This is your brain on shopping.
There’s a reason the area immediately inside the entrance to the supermarket is stacked with promotional items and bargains. Those magazine racks are there for a purpose. And if you’ve ever wondered why the fruit and vegetable section is up front when these items are easily damaged and should be the last things you get before going to the checkout, it’s not because the store managers are dingbats. Same reason the everyday necessities are located near the back of the store.
The sellers have studied us, they know how we shop, and now they’re using MRIs and cellphone position tracking to know more. Consider that as you do your last-minute holiday shopping. (In our experience there’s a lot less human traffic at the mall on Xmas eve, so maybe last-last-minute shopping is a good idea.)
The way the brain buys, in The Economist.
Shoppers already know that everyday items, like milk, are invariably placed towards the back of a store to provide more opportunity to tempt customers. This is why pharmacies are generally at the rear, even in “convenience†stores. But supermarkets know shoppers know this, so they use other tricks, like placing popular items halfway along a section so that people have to walk all along the aisle looking for them. The idea is to boost “dwell timeâ€: the length of time people spend in a store.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 24th, 2008 at 07:46
No, they don’t work on me. My shopping compass always points me to the Oishi Snacks section hoping to find Ridges Wasabi in stock. Sponge cheese:still unavailable! 3 large grocery stores, a fairly big public market and lots of sari-sari stores here in SFDM, QC: nothing. I was tempted to pick-up a discarded package to see if there were some crumbs left… Where did that effing person buy it?
December 24th, 2008 at 12:12
Information graphics of these facts, in relation to calorie intake, from Wired:
http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2007/st_infoporn_1601
December 25th, 2008 at 18:33
Thank God,supermarket chains do not alphabetize their merchandise to keep things organized. Can you imagine, for example: you are looking to buy infant formula for your human baby, and you find these right beside the “insecticides” and “inflammable materials” section. Or the raw hide bones for Poochie right beside the “rat poison”. In a Robinson branch somewhere in Rizal, I always browse through cat and dog foods because I enjoy looking at the variety of their chow so much, I want to be a pet myself. (I’m rather budget conscious, so the regular green 555 sardines make my orange tabby happy and overweight. Dog keeblers is cheaper and my Labradors have no complaint whatsoever). I noticed that they put the cat foods right beside the “car accessories”, specifically, the “carnauba wax section”. Incidentally, Market!Market! supermarket has a great selection of US import toiletries and food stuff that are rather hard to find in other supermarkets.