The Supermarket Affair

I stumbled upon an interesting article while I was cleaning my magazine rack or should I say while I was trying to clean and organize those magazines racked at several places in my tiny room? Anyways, the article was in my “the most fav” magazines – Readers Digest on how supermarkets are fooling the customers by using various placement tricks and I wanted to share my opinion on the same here with you all.

The article pointed out the tricks of those smart supermarket organizers who do just the right thing to speed up billing process and I am sharing my views on that but a point to note here is that I am neither envy nor angry with this fact. I mean, they are doing their business so they will do whats best for them. Anyways, I was just fascinated to see that there are things I don’t think I paid much attention to while shopping in a supermarket and those are actually of importance.

Its not like I am a naive shopper as I do know that all the sweet condiments like toffees and chocolates are always kept at lower shelf’s which basically means at the eye level of kids so that the little ones can trick their parents into buying those for them.

What I didn’t know was that the shopping carts are growing big with each passing year as the supermarkets did survey which showed that with every increased size of shopping cart there is a 15% spike in sale. This caught my attention as I am that shopper who wants a small basket to quickly run to my favorite shelf’s, shop and exit but to my surprise, I always end up taking the big shopping cart as the small ones are no where to be seen. Grrrrr. Now I know why.

One more thing: Did you know that processed and packaged foods are always kept managed in supermarkets VS the fresh produce which is always scattered and not well managed. Its true in my supermarket atleast where they should put all root vegetables together and salad things together but instead its all over the place so someone who wants to buy particular vegetables will have to roam the entire area couple of times but I know where to find pasta and right next shelf I will be able to take the pasta sauce.

Few more of these before you checkout from the blog:

• The checkout counters are intentionally filled with fancy tempting products as you will stand there for a couple of minutes while billing and guess what there are good chances of you getting tempted.
• Most of the big supermarkets have an entrance at one corner of the store and exit after the billing counters at the far end of other side of store. Why? Well, you came in and now you now have to walk across the store to exit even if you don’t want to buy.
• The first thing you see when you enter makes the whole lot of difference like mine has fresh big red apples and pomegranates on right and big yummy looking juice cans on left. Well, it makes sense that we feel good after seeing these fresh colors instead of seeing something else like toilet cleaning products.

There are many more points I am sure and they would be as interesting as these were. Let me know if you have your own points around this and I would end this supermarket journey by saying that Love or Hate affair- this is it. Regardless to say that I love my experience of shopping in my supermarket.