Please don't let the customers languish

As China feeds the needs and desires of a burgeoning middle class, the nation's retailers would do well to keep in mind "conditioned reflex" and the lesson of Pavlov's dogs.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was, of course, the Russian scientist whose experiments with dogs and electric buzzers illustrated conditioned reflex. In a nutshell, a dog conditioned to associate the sound of a buzzer with the arrival of food will eventually salivate at the sound of the buzzer itself.

In a sense, China's bricks-and-mortar establishments engage in a similar game, whereby they tantalize consumers - make them "salivate", if you will - by conditioning them to expect to find on the shelf, or in the bins, the products they've grown accustomed to reaching for time and again.