Does Planet Money’s game pass the shelf test? We go undercover to find out

**Ilan Lee** (0:01)
NPR.

**Wayland Wong** (0:06)
Picture four people huddled suspiciously in front of a big box retail store in Los Angeles.

**Kenny Malone** (0:12)
Feels like we're about to do something bad.

**Ilan Lee** (0:14)
It does, it feels like clandestine somehow, but.

**Wayland Wong** (0:17)
That first voice might sound a little familiar. That was...

**Kenny Malone** (0:20)
That was me! Surprise, Planet Money's Kenny Malone, hello. I'm so excited to be here, Wayland.

**Wayland Wong** (0:24)
I am so excited you're here.

**Kenny Malone** (0:26)
Yeah, so with me that day, on that dubious day, Ilan Li, who is the co-founder of the game company Exploding Kittens, and Ilan and I were about to do, I guess you'd call it the opposite of shoplifting. We were about to go into this big box store and sneak a new board game onto the shelves, because Ilan was giving us an inside look at the very real secret shelf testing process that Exploding Kittens, a very popular party game company, uses in the real world.

**Wayland Wong** (0:57)
This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Wayland Wong.

**Kenny Malone** (1:00)
And I'm Kenny Malone. You know, the retail shelves, they are still a surprisingly big part of our lives. And today, we get unusual inside access to the art and the science of how companies design their products and test their products to catch our attention.

**Wayland Wong** (1:18)
Kenny and the Planet Money team have been working with the Exploding Kittens game company to make an economics inspired board game and documenting that journey over on their show.

**Kenny Malone** (1:27)
It's true. And, you know, we were hoping, in part, that this game could be a Trojan horse to let us report from inside the world of big box retail. And for Alon Lee with Exploding Kittens, that big box process, it starts once they have prototypes of their game. He will often sneak copies of the game into big box stores to observe, like a retail field scientist.

**Ilan Lee** (1:53)
Um, I don't know that there's so much a science to this as much as an art.

**Kenny Malone** (1:58)
Fine, fine. Okay, fine. Retail field artist, whatever.

**Ilan Lee** (2:02)
We're gonna try a bunch of stuff. If we're feeling adventurous, talk to some regular customers, point at the thing and say, what do you think of that? And see what we get.

**Wayland Wong** (2:10)
Okay. So the plan is to hide things on the shelf, observe.

**Kenny Malone** (2:14)
Yeah. Have you not done this before, Waylon?

**Wayland Wong** (2:16)
No, that's right.

**Kenny Malone** (2:17)
And so, you know, into the store we go, headed to the game.

**Ilan Lee** (2:21)
The game section is always on either side wall or back wall.

**Kenny Malone** (2:26)
So, all right. Picture Waylon, me and Alon. Plus, we've got two accomplices here, Erica Barris, Maddie Murdock, and we're playing it totally cool. Just walking like normal people who are, yes, holding two very professional looking prototypes of our game. So, this is about the size of a Kleenex box.
It's a beautiful purple, and the name of the game is, Sell Me a Sasquatch.

**Wayland Wong** (2:50)
Sell Me a Sasquatch.

**Kenny Malone** (2:51)
Sell Me a Sasquatch. There's a whole episode about naming the game, and we arrive at the board game aisle. We notice Uno, Scrabble, Settlers of Catan.

**Ilan Lee** (3:02)
You also will notice that with almost no exceptions, bigger boxes are bottom or top shelf.

**Wayland Wong** (3:09)
What does that do?

**Ilan Lee** (3:10)
Makes them harder to sell, but they do that because they have more space.

**Kenny Malone** (3:15)
So, Waylon, that is why we decided to make Selmia Sasquatch a relatively small game, so that it has a good chance, if we get into big box, of getting that eye level shelf spot, which coincidentally is exactly where Elon puts our prototypes.

**Ilan Lee** (3:30)
Okay, you just put it up there. Yeah.

**Kenny Malone** (3:33)
Now that our purple little Selmia Sasquatch prototype is there, there are three basic tests that we're going to run to sort of answer three basic questions, Waylon. Question number one is pretty simple. It's, how does it look on a shelf now that it's there with all these other games?

**Wayland Wong** (3:48)
Right. So like, does it stand out from the crowd of games?

**Kenny Malone** (3:51)
Yes, exactly. In part. But also, there are other obvious problems that we maybe just hadn't noticed yet until it was on a shelf. So for example, we noticed that from a distance, our game's title is like weirdly spaced, like all the words are running together. It looks like Selmia.