You’re convinced you’ve mastered your grocery store.
You stick to the perimeter to prioritize fresh items instead of getting lured by packaged goods. You shop at dawn or late at night to dodge crowds. You even know exactly when shelves get restocked after the busy weekend and which bagger will never, ever crush your eggs.
But do you actually understand your grocery store? Inside those thousands of square feet of perfectly arranged merchandise, can you distinguish the features meant to help you from the ones designed to make you spend more?
How to Outsmart Stores and Keep Grocery Costs Down
Retailers rely on these eight strategies to encourage you to part with extra cash at the supermarket without you noticing. Here’s what they do — and how to beat them at their own game.
1. They Nudge You to Turn Right
Entrances are often positioned to the right for a reason: to steer shoppers to move counterclockwise through the store. Since most people are right-handed, it’s simpler to guide with the left hand and grab with the right, branding expert Martin Lindstrom explains in his book “Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy.”
2. They Group Unrelated Items Together
If you’ve stumbled upon tortillas and salsa on the same shelf, that’s an adjacency at work. The same goes if you find sandwich bags next to the bread instead of in the paper/plastic aisle or a stack of charcoal beside frozen burgers instead of in seasonal displays.
By clustering seemingly unrelated products, stores are actually targeting a specific shopper: the one exhausted from circling the aisles trying to locate essentials.
“Adjacencies are also about order — creating a logical sequence of items,” Paco Underhill notes in “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping.”
Convenient as those groupings may be, they aren’t always cheaper than the alternatives you’ll find elsewhere in the store.
3. Shopping Carts Keep Growing
From 1975 to 2000, grocery cartsgrew to about three times their earlier size. There are several competing ideas about why, including Ralph Nader’s suggestion that stores were shaming customers into buying more whenever they shopped.
The precise cause is difficult to nail down — much like whether cart size truly changes buying behavior. Just keep in mind that opting to use a cart doesn’t obligate you to cram it full every trip.
4. They Move Things Around to Make You Wander
Can’t locate an item that’s always on your list? Some stores relocate products as frequently as monthly. It might be shifting a cereal brand a few feet or placing something in a totally different section.
“The result is that not only are we tempted by more products,” Lindstrom writes in “Brandwashed,” “but finding what we want becomes a sort of game, at the end of which we often reward ourselves for our effort by buying something that wasn’t on our list.”
5. Angles Aren’t Just for Photos
Endcaps and obstructive displays serve a double purpose to wear you down as you shop.
Endcaps are typically reserved for promoted items that, even on sale, may still cost more than the store’s own brand. Or they simply tempt your senses and distract you from your planned purchases.
“An endcap can boost an item’s sales simply because as we walk down an aisle we approach them head-on, seeing them clearly and fully,” Underhill writes in “Why We Buy.”
Ever had to squeeze past freestanding displays on either side of an aisle? The store likely stacked featured items in those displays and angled them to catch your eye — or to snag a corner of your cart.
6. Pleasant Scents Aren’t an Accident
Supermarkets have renewed their emphasis on freshness, but it’s not only to lure you inside. It’s to engage your senses once you’re there.
“It’s true that with the exception of the produce aisles, supermarkets have no tradition of feeding our desire for sensory stimulation, for scent or taste or touch or even sight,” Underhill explains. “They’re still stuck in the early ‘60s, the era of frozen, canned, processed and packaged food and the germless ideal of blinding white cleanliness.”
These days you can probably point to where your local store has added elements of “sensual shopping.” Maybe the bakery offers more fresh loaves, or the coffee section lets you scoop aromatic specialty beans. A bigger floral department?
Yes — all of it is as calculated as it is convenient.
7. Background Music Slows You Down — and Gets You to Buy More
Samuel George and his grandchildren Jonathan George, 3, and Alayah George, 1, shop at Sam’s Club in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Wednesday, August 16, 2017. Sharon Steinmann/The Penny Hoarder
Ever caught yourself humming along to mellow oldies while you pick up groceries?
Douglas Rushkoff writes in “Coercion: Why We Listen to What ‘They’ Say” that shoppers buy about 38% more when a store plays slow-tempo Muzak.
Marketing professor Ronald Milliman monitored shoppers at a Dallas grocery for two months to observe the impact of musical tempo. Most customers couldn’t recall whether music was playing, but on days with slower music the store earned roughly $4,000 more.
“People simply, as you slowed them down, saw more they remembered they needed… or wanted,” Milliman told Freakonomics Radio.
Lose yourself in the soundtrack, and your grocery bill can creep up with you.
8. Coupons Often Lead to More Spending
Ever glanced at a manufacturer coupon for a new item and thought, “It’s 25% off — I’ll try it this once”?
“Based on marketers’ data, consumers who try a new product are likely to stick with it for an average of a year and a half,” Lindstrom writes. “So if a store can guess which new product you might enjoy and offer a free sample, coupon or promo to get you to try it, it potentially secures your spending for the next 18 months.”
Before you tear a coupon from a blinking dispenser, take another glance at the item’s price.
And remember: fewer than 3% of manufacturer coupons ever get redeemed, according to Underhill. Clip carefully?
By spotting store maneuvers and doing a bit of prep before shopping — such as using apps and planning your list — you can protect both your wallet and your appetite.
Edited by Ava Mitchell.
