Recently I read an article about the psychology of grocery stores and how they market products to get you to spend more money. Now it included fairly harmless things like grouping items that go together (chips near salsa, for instance), and craftier tricks such as placing more expensive items at eye level and cheaper items on bottom shelves where it's harder to reach and see, and strategically placing essential food items (bread, milk, and eggs) far apart from one another so that shoppers have to walk through the entire store to get to them.
Sometimes stores play slow music, which humans respond to by slowing down, and therefore spending more time in the store. Sometimes stores put smaller tiles into aisles with more expensive products to make you feel like you're going faster, so that you'll slow down in that aisle. Sometimes the 10 for $10 marks an item UP instead of down. Sometimes they will change the pricing tags to red (because traditionally red indicates a sale) and the item will NOT be on sale.
I have, at different times, fallen for all of these tricks.
From now on, I'm making a grocery list before I leave the house, and I am not deviating. No longer will I trust anything marked with red. No longer will I trust 10 for $10 sales. The grocery store is a house of lies.
I did some research of my own, and not only are there a lot of articles on these tricks, and how to avoid getting sucked into them, but some of the more ridiculous ones (like the smaller tiles on the floors of more expensive aisles) turned out to be true in some stores, and false in others, so not everyone is out to get us (at least it was false in the Safeway where I measured with a tape measure, I looked crazy, but I found the truth people).
Articles on this marketing craziness:
Supermarket Tricks
How Grocery Stores Trick You
Supermarket Mind Games
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