It's Sunday night and you're completely out of milk. You quickly zip down to the grocery store, eager to finish the short errand so you can return back to lazy evening activities. But suddenly you find yourself wavering in several aisles, pulling things from shelves and eventually pushing a large cart throughout the entire store. You grumble at the checkout line as you pull out a wad of money, wondering how the heck you ended up there.
Oh, and you forgot the milk.
Sound familiar?
Grocery stores across America are designed specifically to manipulate consumers to spend more time inside, buy more products and choose what they want you to purchase.
Most supermarkets have you begin your shopping trip in the produce section - that's on purpose. The area is colorful, bright and attractive. Notice how many lights are installed just within that area to highlight fruits and vegetables.
In Martin Lindstrom's publication Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, he says the color of produce is even altered to trick you into buying more. Kitchen staples like apples and bananas have been painstakingly modified to have a color and shade deemed most attractive to consumers. Linden mentions that certain colors are often paired together to evoke specific emotions from happiness, comfort to even homesickness.
Color isn't just important within food products. Red is often implemented in sales signs because it has been proven to draw in the eye.
Another sneaky tactic grocery stores use is creating roadblocks during your shopping trip.
The layout of a supermarket is designed to require the customer to spend as much time as possible under its roof. Have you ever noticed how the produce section and the dairy aisle are at complete opposite ends of the store? The whole experience is meant to be as inconvenient as possible so you as a consumer has to pass more products to get to what's really on your list.
There are no windows, no skylights and we bet you a bundle of bananas that you won't be able to find a clock anywhere.
Stores place popular products in the middle of aisles so that you're more likely to be distracted by alternatives on the way. The most expensive items are placed at eye level while generic brands are lower, so you're more prone to pick the first thing you see and therefore spend more money. Kids can be manipulated as well. Stores place sugary, kid-oriented products on lower levels of the aisle so children can reach for those products, popping them in your cart or having a meltdown until you say yes.
Even the grocery store music is intended to befuddle shoppers. According to freakanomics, people spend 34 percent more time shopping in stores that play music.
Our best advice for avoiding this trickery? Know what's a ploy and what you should look out for when making your daily grocery trip. Have a list and stick to it and don't shop when you're hungry.
Oh, and one more thing.
Don't forget the milk.
Mallory Arnold is an assistant editor. Feedback welcome at marnold@cityscenemediagroup.com.
