Strategies Supermarkets Use To Get You To Buy More

A rule of thumb when you’re going to do your grocery shopping is to never do it while you’re hungry. You’re always going to end up buying a lot more food than you were intending on buying because your hunger factored into your decision. 

What about when you’re not hungry? Let’s take a look at how your local grocery store employs a combination of strategies to get you to buy more. 

Store Structure

Stores will structure their layout to make you unconsciously choose to spend more money, and milk every penny before you exit a store. They leverage human biases to get us to be as irrational as possible. 

When you enter a store, you’re going to only have one exit in most supermarkets. The aisles will be arranged in a way to place essentials such as milk, cheese, eggs, and toilet paper at the very end. To get to the essentials, you’ll have to walk through a plethora of products and brands; enticing you to purchase something along the way that you might have not even planned to get. 

Eye Level Shelves

Upselling is a common strategy stores and brands employ.Supermarkets use a planogram to arrange their products on the shelves. 

Next time you walk in your supermarket, you will find the premium products at the eye level shelves. The cheaper, smaller pack will be at the bottom in most categories. Bending down all the time to pick a product from the shelf is a tedious thing to do as you’re moving around the store. It’s easier to turn your head to take the “better brand” at eye-level which is a “few cents more.”

Bright Lighting 

Store lighting makes an immediate impression on customers. When displaying fruits, meat, and vegetables, the colour of the food has to make it look juicy and fresh. Grocers are using LED lighting through their displays to bring out their truest colours. LED lighting in grocery stores makes food appear more appetizing. Under dim fluorescent lighting, meat and produce look darker and less appealing when compared to food under LEDs. The better the food looks, the more grocers will sell.

Grocers will use bright lighting to their advantage to give you a sense of comfort while you shop. A majority of supermarkets don’t have large windows because they want to keep you distracted from time and they combine this by not having any clocks on the wall to keep you shopping longer.