Ethnography Results - Week 1

After the first week of studying trends concerning free samples in grocery stores, the observations I made were not in line with my private guesses.  I decided to go to HEB and covertly observe people in the baked goods section (there were no displays with employees handing out samples at the time), and I was surprised at the low volume of samplers.  During my time at the store, only 17 shoppers tried free samples.  Of these, I classified 9 as elderly (people who looked 60+), 4 as middle aged (40-60), 3 as young adults (20-40) and 1 as young (a child with his grandmother).  While there were more females than males who took free samples (11 to 6), there seemed to be more women than men in the store at the time, so the ratio was more or less proportional

Of these 17 samplers, I only observed one who purchased the product.  An additional three seemed to consider the product they were sampling, waiting a few seconds after trying the product to walk away.  The other 13 simply took a sample when they passed the display.  The majority of people only took one sample, with the exception being the child/grandmother combo (she got at least 1 for each of them).

When setting out on this assignment, I expected that there would be more youths to take free samples than older people.  I was surprised to find the correlation to be exactly the opposite, though observations at different times of the day could yield different results.  I must note that based on Dr. Hammond's comments last week, I plan on pursuing a different ethnography study with my team for the remainder of the semester.