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3 - Customers’ Inquiries about Products

Establishing Grounds for the Decision to Buy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2023

By
Katariina Harjunpää ,
Lorenza Mondada  and
Kimmo Svinhufvud
Edited by
Barbara Fox ,
Lorenza Mondada  and
Marja-Leena Sorjonen
Barbara Fox
Affiliation:
University of Colorado Boulder
Lorenza Mondada
Affiliation:
University of Basel
Marja-Leena Sorjonen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
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Summary

The chapter examines the formatting of initial turns by customers at the counter, before they decide and in order to select what to buy. On the basis of recordings in bakeries in Finland, France, and Switzerland, it is shown how customers may face a range of practical problems in making decisions as to what or whether to purchase, including seeing items that might look appealing but which they don’t recognize or for which they do not know the ingredients. Through the design of their questions, drawing on verbal, material, and embodied resources, customers make publicly available to the sellers their epistemic access to the products (e.g., they do not know enough about the item to formulate its identity with anything more than a demonstrative pronoun or demonstrative determiner plus ‘empty’ noun). With their answers sellers provide information that may be immediately useful for the customer in making their decision, or which may need further elaboration. The referential practices employed by both customers and sellers reveal features of items that are locally relevant for the practical purposes of buying, in particular sequential, material, and embodied locations in interaction.

Keywords

bakery encountersepistemic access to productscustomer inquiries about productsquestion designreferential practicesmultimodal resourcesFinlandFranceSwitzerland
Type
Chapter
Information
Encounters at the Counter
The Organization of Shop Interactions
 , pp. 73 - 108
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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