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As a career manager in a grocery store, I’m just getting a kick out of the conspiracies here over why stores reline products or display items on cardboard shippers. I want to hear theories on why end-caps tend to change each week.
Easy. Manufacturers pay for endcap displays and choice shelf space. It’s advertising for them. (source: I work for a brewery, and that’s how they put together the beer aisle. I’ve seen the software used to build the shelf arrangements.)
If they mix up the layout you’re forced to look at more products instead of automatically going to the places you expect a product to be. It’s a marketing tactic.
There’s more reasons than that but if it’s definitely one of the bigger reasons a small stock change can trigger a total mix up of the whole aisle.
It’s also why stores are more and more being designed like mazes, without clear signage, and with related products spread far apart. They inconvenience you specifically to extract money from you.
They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.
Literally trying to disorient shoppers like rats in a fucking maze, truly capitalism is not dystopian in any way!
Eh, it’s food, there’s only so much I can eat. So it’s not as if I’m going to suddenly buying more food because I’m walking around the grocery store. Even if I did, it would be longer before I’d need to go back and get more food.
I think it’s more down to certain brands paying the grocery store to have their products placed in more prominent places. So yeah people will buy different things, but not more. But if it’s more Brand X instead of Brand Y, Brand X makes more money and kicks back some of that to the grocery store.
The average amount of food I buy should be, on average, the same as the amount of food I consume, but the amount of food purchased during a given shopping trip varies, especially in the amount spent on nonperishables. I am likely to buy a lot of a given item, store the extras for when I need them, and buy more when I run out.
If I am wandering around the store, I may see an item (like a snack) that I am interested in trying and pick some up. In doing so, I am slightly delaying the next time I need to buy more, but it is an overall gain for the store since they are getting my money earlier and the future stock up trip may be from a different store.
Also if there’s something new in a spot you’re used to looking for a regular purchase in, you’re more likely to notice the new item, and thus buy it - in addition to the thing you were going to buy anyway.
Some people in these comments are acting like we don’t make decisions while we’re shopping.
I can’t guess what individual people will do but, as a group, shoppers end up spending more this way. Supermarkets and grocery stores typically sell many things besides food; toys, magazines, beauty products, etc.
The store also doesn’t need you to eat all the food you buy. If you throw out a bunch of food, as many people frequently do, the store still gets paid for all of it.
People buy more. It increases sales, it’s not some secret. They may not buy more forever but a couple items is enough.
The brands aren’t paying stores to do that, most grocery stores have very little interaction with brands directly and just order from warehouses.
Grocery stores don’t have interaction with brands? Are you sure? Why do you think most them have discount cards? It’s not because they’re being generous.
The discount cards allow them to sell that data to market research companies who analyze which products are often purchased together. They use that data to determine the optimal places to put the products.
You get that discount in exchange for allowing them to track what you buy. The money they make from their interaction with various brands exceeds the discount they offer with those cards, otherwise they wouldn’t be offering those discounts.
That’s a great example of indirect brand interaction and how various brands perform market research without involving grocers.
If they wanted a grocery store could just sell that data. Discount cards guarantee that a given shopper buys their merchandise instead of another brands. Your use of they is ambiguous in this context.
Larger stores, like say Walmart or albertsons, are far more likely to have direct deals with brands. Smaller stores often will with in particular local brands bit it depends on the specifics. Your run of the mill grocer, rarer and rarer these days, probably has very little direct interaction in the way you are suggesting. It’s certainly not why stores reorganize, when that is demonstrably because that just boosts sales.
Go chat with managers who do procurement at a grocery store, this isn’t secretive conspiracy stuff, it’s all just out there.
Some people will definitely buy more. One look at global obesity rates shows that people don’t buy less food just because they don’t need to eat that much. He/she didn’t say everyone would buy more, just some percentage. You’re obviously not part of that percentage, which is great. But it doesn’t have to be many who do to make the effort of rearranging worth it for stores. 1% of people buying more means millions of dollars for a big box chain that does hundreds of millions in sales every year.
But ultimately it’s a combination of things. Some buy more. Some buy different brands they don’t usually buy. Maybe those brands have a few more in the package than other brands and people unwittingly buy more. Maybe they try an entirely new product line they’ve never tried and it becomes a new normal thing.
As an adult it makes me mad mostly because I know I’m being played and being made intentionally less efficient but I have to deal with it anyway because I don’t really have a choice.
i always got mad, as long as i remember because WHY would they change it if IT WORKED FOR ALL MY LIFE
god damn it
In order to make you walk around the store more giving you more opportunities to buy stuff you didn’t intend to buy
i don’t care I’m gonna buy my whatevers and I’m out of there
it’s their fault then that i have to run through the store to get to it
Local Asian markets don’t rearrange.
Studies show more time spent in the store equates to more sales. They have to measure time in store and extra sales against time to reorganize. As regular time moves forward it becomes increasingly worth more to rearrange until it outweighs the time to reorganize by a certain margin.
Grocery chains have software for putting together shelf arrangements. Suppliers have to pay if they want their products at a quality location at eye level, or near the ends of the aisle. And of course pay more for things like endcap displays.
I cried when they closed the old Walmart for a super center when I was a child. This isn’t an age thing it’s a comfort from familiarity thing.
To force people to spend more time shopping. More time means more chance for impulse buying and better sales. Basic marketing.
More time also means your appetite is starting to get engaged, since it’s usually after work and you’re surrounded by attractively laid out foods. It’s just a fact that people buy more if they’re hungry.
So even if you just went to pick up a bag of milk on your way home, maybe some other stuff looked good too while you were there.
I think Aldi is so successful in the US because they don’t do this. There is an aisle or two with random crap, and seasonal items in another spot, but I can be in and out with everything I went for in ten minutes. Trader Joe’s might do this too, I haven’t been to one in a long time. I wonder if Whole Foods or the other upscale stores fuck around with their shoppers like that.
Smaller grocery chains or independent grocers didnt change their store layouts from what I remember, but they went under or were bought out by the big chains that are already very profitable but still try to wring everything they can out of their captive audience.
We have Ikea in the UK , which is a single track that meanders through the store. It forces you through every aisle. There are exits and shortcuts built into to it, but they do not make them obvious. I absolutely refuse to shop there. The few times I have been in the store has always left me angry for wasting my time.
I don’t get mad at that as much as I get mad when products are placed in the wrong fucking isle, like the fucking Wal-Mart in Heartsville, SC, where everything is everywhere except on the isle it’s labeled to go in.
Grocery store by me rearranged the store so that it was organized by country, instead of by type of product. Now there’s 4 individual locations to pick a bag of beans from because the red kidney beans from Iraq are sooooo muuuuuch different than the red kidney beans from costa rica.
I think that’s kinda neat actually. Like it sounds annoying, but as far as gimicks go it’s not the worst
Maybe stores that care about shopping locally should stock all the local products near the entrance, the interstate products beyond that, and the imported products right at the back. Encourage supporting local growers and producers, reducing transport carbon emissions, and make it real easy for the consumer to recognuze the difference
Expectations don’t being met is a problem for every age group. Most kids simply don’t expect the grocery store aisle to look a certain way.
Getting out of our comfort zone can help us to grow.
… it’s to sell more stuf. Nothing else.
Well jokes on them, I used it to improve my resilience and adaptability anyway!
This is the way.
Aslong as they don’t move the reduced section I’m good
I’m more upset about places trying to charge $8 for a goddamn box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Try buying actual food instead of garbage
This has the same energy as that meme with the guy learning the flute
So $12 for the healthy cereal then, got it. /j
Cause people who buy “actual food” never buy some snacks.
And also, suuuure, only the garbage food is the expensive stuff, riiiight?
The nutrients/$ ratio of garbage food makes it the most expensive
Damn this happened to me last month and just today I got pissed looking for my Chex Mix.