Study: Attractive store personnel could 'put off shoppers'

While conventional wisdom suggests that you want attractive, well-groomed people staffing the aisles and counters of your retail establishment, a new study suggests the opposite may be partly true — at least when it comes to female shoppers.

London's Retail Week reports on a new study from the University of South Australia, which found that women are less likely to buy a given item in a store if they perceive that the store personnel are better looking than they are.

"Retailers often think that beautiful is better. In the same way they use a celebrity to endorse a product, they hire a beautiful girl thinking that it reflects the brand and that other women will want to be like her.

"It does not always work like that — women may not consider celebrities a direct social threat, but they might consider the girl at their local shopping centre to be one."

No similar study was done on male shoppers. One can only assume that the study's authors consider the male attitude toward attractive store personnel to be self-evident and not worth putting under the microscope.