We all have to go shopping, and for the most part, we don’t think about the overall experience. However, the companies that sell us products spend a lot of money thinking about it, researching, testing the market, and coming up with the perfect way to get us to spend more money. They don’t go beyond psychological tricks to get what they want, and will happily use forms of legal deception to increase their profits.
10. Grocery stores start with flowers and products that awaken your senses
You may have noticed from visiting grocery stores over the years that whoever designs these things, no matter which company, will go to great lengths to get you to walk past the flower section first, and then the produce will be placed not too far away. Now, we could come up with crazy theories about how all stores are built through a lot of construction and want to keep using the same template, perhaps out of laziness or the ease of quickly creating template layouts. However, the truth is that it all comes down to grocery stores knowing some basic human psychology and deciding on their own to use it against you.
Grocery stores have realized that when buying things like groceries, people are more likely to buy more and trust the store more if they think it is fresh. By making people walk past the flower shop and buy the groceries first, you make them think the rest of the store is fresh, even if it is not. Grocery stores will go so far as to push this on you that almost every grocery store will make you walk past the flower section first, just to emphasize freshness, even if they do very little flower business except on Mother's Day or Valentine's Day.
9. Department stores enrich your senses with cologne
Department stores are starting to die out, but they still act as anchor stores for many large shopping malls and are at least part of history. And of course, if you want to buy cologne or perfume away from the Internet, you still usually go to a department store like Macy's or JCPenney. One thing you may have noticed is that the fragrance section is often very obvious and impossible to miss, just like with groceries, where the pleasant aroma usually hits you right away.
This arousal of your senses makes you think that all the clothes must be really clean and beautiful, because when you first walk past them, you smell nothing but nice things. This strategy makes sense, because you want people to associate expensive brands with expensive things, and the fact that you usually walk past jewelry doesn’t hurt either. However, it can also lead to consumer confusion. Many consumers return home from the store to find that their cologne and perfume smells different than when they tested it in person. This is a real phenomenon, and it is related to the store’s attempts to arouse your senses, but it is not necessarily a hoax. With so many people testing colognes and perfumes in the store, and sometimes pumping out nice smells, it can confuse your senses even if you don’t want it to.
8. Place sugary breakfast cereals so they face your children.
Sugary breakfast cereals try to justify their existence by promising that they are fortified with all the vitamins and minerals your kids need. They spend a ton of money on marketing every year and constantly change the ingredients in their cereals to keep them interesting to your kids. And when we say they are aimed directly at your kids, we are not talking about a conspiracy; we mean they have been doing this for years and are very open about it.
And we don’t just mean cute mascots or commercials while your kids watch cartoons, although they do that too. They have contracts with grocery stores to ensure that product placement is appropriate to manipulate the growing minds of your young ones. In the U.S., cereal companies block off an entire aisle and make sure the cereals they want to sell the most are positioned at eye level with your kids. They also make sure that the mascots for those products have wide, friendly eyes, toothy smiles, and trustworthy faces practically begging you to eat the cereal.
7. Baking ready-made loaves of dough gives baked goods the illusion of freshness.
You may have noticed that some grocery store bakeries go out of their way to regularly advertise their fresh baguettes, bagels, and the like. And they might even advertise that they have a fresh bread slicer for some of the specialty bread lovers. This makes you feel like you are passing by a real fresh bakery and you want to buy some of the cakes, cookies, or other delicious baked goods on display.
However, if you are looking for fresh baked goods, you may want to go elsewhere or just make your own. Very little is fresh in a grocery store bakery. The loaves of bread are frozen and baked by the employees. Sometimes, the employees also make pre-baked cakes. Beyond that, grocery store bakeries are mostly for decoration, as they take pre-made cake templates and put personalized messages on them for people. This illusion makes you feel even more like the store is fresh, but most of the baking is done in an off-site kitchen.
6. Chances are good that all the fish in your seafood section was frozen.
When you buy something that is advertised as fresh, you tend to believe that it is, and you are likely to be very annoyed if you find out that you have been deceived. When it comes to meat and fish, we tend to think that “fresh” means that that particular meat or fish has only ever been refrigerated and has never been in the freezer. The fast food chain Wendy’s is famous for trying to convince customers to choose them by emphasizing that their meat is never frozen.
However, when it comes to fish, it exists in a weird place where most people just think of fresh fish as the stuff you buy on ice in the seafood section, even though that makes no sense at all. Even if you live near a market near the ocean where you can have fresh fish delivered to you daily, the fact that it’s put on ice so it can be sold hardly makes it “fresh.” But that’s kind of the problem with the whole idea of selling fresh fish. Some experts argue that the whole idea is an illusion, since in order to keep their catch fresh long enough to get back from shore, most fishermen immediately put their catch on ice, which automatically defeats the whole concept.
5. Stores often print out sales information knowing that they have an unreasonably low supply to meet demand.
Stores will do everything they can to entice you, such as promotions or constant sales, and they are not above a few dirty tricks. While most will not outright lie to you, if only because it is illegal, they will not go beyond printing good sales, knowing full well that they will not have enough product to meet demand. You may wonder how they get away with it, but there are a number of legal scams that can be pulled.
One of the original favorites was to use the limited supply gimmick during sales on days like Black Friday to get people in the door, even though most stores only had a couple of the advertised items in stock and others had none. Even with this disclaimer, the pressure has mounted and stores seem to have largely stopped this practice. However, grocery stores still play you quite often. Another favorite trick is to run a limited-time sale, with no disclaimer for the limited amount of merchandise, and just count on you not realizing you can ask for a rain check.
4. Ikea makes you go through a maze so you can see everything
Ikea is famous for selling furniture with weird and confusing instructions that people usually, after too many hours and maybe a few punched walls and thrown Allen keys, end up assembling more or less correctly, almost in spite of them. The furniture has managed to infiltrate homes and dorms around the world, and the assembly model has since become common among many furniture makers who have realized the value of selling a compact product that the consumer can assemble themselves. They are also usually located in remote locations, forcing people to make small pilgrimages to them, so it is certainly an unforgettable experience each time.
The truth is that the fact that Ikea is out of the way is just part of their clever strategy to trap you in their web and make you spend a lot of money. Not only is Ikea out of the way, but it is literally designed like a maze, so that, unlike the usual up and down aisles, you have a better chance of visiting every part of the store and seeing everything before you leave. They also have their own restaurant, ideally located at the end of the store, just when you have worked up an appetite after a long walk and when you are far from other places to eat.
3. Many selling prices are calculated lies, but people still want the illusion.
We all love sales, and stores know this, so they advertise them constantly. And of course, during the holidays, sales increase exponentially until that's almost all we see. We feel good, thinking that we've beaten the system, or somehow won, and the retailers win by making money. But the truth is, most of these sales aren't sales at all, and the retailers know exactly what they're doing. Capitalism!
You might think that retailers set some sort of regular price on a particular item and that the sale is meant to entice you to buy more to offset a slow period or make the most of a busy period. However, the truth is that most stores are running sales almost constantly, and most sales don't make you a little less profit, which is the price they wanted you to pay for it in the first place. Now, before you go grabbing the pitchforks of big retailers, know that a big retailer once tried to put an end to this nonsense, and the consumer backlash was legendary. Basically, the CEO of JCPenney was trying to make everyday low prices and put an end to the constant fake sales, and customers were outraged.
2. The "Best By" or other similar label is not worth the paper it is printed on.
You may have noticed that your products have several different types of expiration date labels on them and are wondering what they all mean. And the answer is a little complicated. The actual expiration date on the manufacturer’s sealed package may not always need to be followed, but it’s safe to say they are trying to protect you. However, labels that say “best if used” or “best when used” mean a lot more to the retailer than to the consumer.
You see, the "best by" label doesn't mean the product is expired or unsafe, it just means the taste and texture of the product has started to deteriorate, and the company doesn't want that level of quality control to get past them. Essentially, they're making you their quality control agent after the fact and save money (while making more of yours) by having you throw them away and buy more and more often. Expiry date labels can be even more complicated because there are labels that are applied to well-sealed products and then there are labels, like the ones on meat, that are sold in the store itself. You may be surprised to learn that the store has the right to change the expiration date labels on products if they create the original label themselves.
1. Stores change their products regularly in an attempt to get you to buy more stuff.
This is a complaint that many people have made, and it drives almost everyone crazy. There probably isn't a person reading this who hasn't at least once been baffled by the fact that their grocery store has decided it's time to reorganize the entire store, moving things around so thoroughly that you have to relearn the entire setup. You walk around in frustration, asking employees, many of whom don't seem to know either, and finally figure it all out again. All the while, you're cursing whichever corporation thought this was a good idea, and you're starting to wander into conspiracy territory, wondering if this is all just a corporate plan to trick you into spending more money.
And we hate to say it, but this time the conspiracy theorists are absolutely right. Grocery stores regularly rearrange themselves because they want you to forget where everything is. They do this, as you might imagine, so that you’ll see products you’ve forgotten about or perhaps never noticed before, and hopefully change your shopping habits in a way that gets more money out of your wallet. Shoppers almost universally hate this practice, but given that grocers continue to do it, it’s probably working.
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