Grocery Store Shrinks

If you are an American you probably already know that there are hundreds of thousands of grocery store psychologists.  These are not people who have a couch set up in a grocery store asking you how you feel about your childhood.  No, these are the people who systematically plan out how to advertise, display and partner foods so that you unknowingly are drawn to buying things you never intended too.  Food manufactures also employ these same types of people to design packaging that scream, “You have got to buy me.”

This is not a purely American phenomenon.  I have been to grocery stores in lots of countries and they all are employing the same tricks.  Things like the highest profit margin items at eye level and red and yellow packaging.

Since January is national “the whole country is on a diet month,” until the Super Bowl, the second highest eating day after Thanksgiving, stores are running lots of promotions on diet foods.  Special K must make half of their annual sales in the month of January.  Come February people are sick of sugar-free dry flakes and go back to sugar pops.

Nothing in a major grocery store is left up to chance.  Those Psychologist are getting paid big bucks to design every aisle, end cap and store flyer to maximize store sales.  Today, while I was at the Harris Teeter I saw one of my favorite store gimmick pairings I have ever seen.  In the soda aisle under the diet Coke display hung a shelf basket full of Hershey bars.

Now I don’t drink soda, but I don’t usually think of a cola and a chocolate bar being the best taste combination, not like chocolate and peanut butter or Hersheys, marshmallows and graham crackers, classics!  I know exactly what the thinking was behind this; it’s diet month, everyone is going to buy diet soda, but it’s week three and their resolve is getting weak, it’s the perfect time to sabotage their diet with a chocolate bar.  Of course the person buying it can justify buying the candy since they are having a diet soda.  Damn those grocery store shrinks.  How are normal, non-advanced degreed humans supposed to withstand such wicked tricks?

The stores have come up with the answer to this, Internet grocery shopping.  My Harris Teeter has a service where you can order your groceries on-line, a store clerk shops the store with your list and bags them and you just pull up to the front of the store and they put the groceries in your car.  The store charges some fee for this, like say $5 and you can avoid all their tricks to get you to buy stuff you never needed.  The store makes money on the fee so it works out the same for them.  I’m waiting to see what those store Psychologists are going to do to entice us when we don’t even walk in the store.  Perhaps the person bringing the bags out is going to have donuts and cookies hanging in baskets around their neck.