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Did You Know?
Facts about February
February and January were introduced into the Roman calendar about 700 BCE when the calendar was extended from ten to twelve months. Before that Romans considered winter a monthless period.
February was named after the Latin word “februa” - which means cleansing or purification, and reflects the purification ritual undertaken before Spring.
The Saxons called February the “sprout-kale” - from the sprouting of cabbage or kale. In Finnish, the month is called “helmikuu”, meaning "month of the pearl" - snow melting on tree branches forms droplets which freeze again resembling pearls of ice. Ukrainians call this month “luty” (fierce), the month of ice and hard frost.
Are we manipulated into buying stuff we don't need?
The concept of shopping mall was invented by Victor Gruen, Austrian-born architect, who designed in 1956 the Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota. Today, the majority of shopping centers around the world are fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered complexes with an anchor-tenant, a garden court, a fountain and a food court.
With the shopping malls came the new rules and practices to draw the customers in and to make them buy, buy more. Here are just a few of those.
Say, the escalators should be placed on the opposite sides on the each layer to make customers walk by all the shops and thus increase the chances of them popping in one-two of them. And this walking distance ideally should not exceed 1000 feet or 300 meters (which is the equivalent of about three city blocks) for a customer not to get tired and not to lose shopping interest.
The time a person needs to slow down and stop is also taken into account: so it is better not to have a store next door to a bank because shoppers speed up when they walk past a bank (there's nothing to look at), and thus are likely to walk past a shop without even noticing it.