Dr. William V. Raszka, our Associate Editor, offers the following insight into a current topic in the news:Last week I went to the grocery store to purchase milk, cereal, and fruit. I was heading for the check-out counter when an end-of-aisle display caught my attention. Cans of diced tomatoes, which I use frequently when cooking, were on sale. The sign indicating the price also noted that customers could only purchase three. I wasn’t planning on cooking with diced tomatoes soon and I already had quite a stash in the pantry, but this was a good deal. Anyone facing a similar predicament should know that the placement of food items, cost, and even the exact wording of the signage in most large grocery stores have been carefully choreographed by food manufacturers.
According to an article in Time (The Culture: November 7, 2011), manufacturers have all kinds of tricks to make sure shoppers buy their products and more specifically, buy something that they had not planned on buying. Research has shown that shoppers respond to seemingly small cues. For example, using parquet rather than linoleum floors in a particular aisle conveys a sense of quality and may make shoppers slow. Creating ridges in the floor makes the shopping cart clatter and cause shoppers to instinctively slow. The goal is to make sure the shopper spends as much time as possible looking at the food items. Grocery stores appeal to very primitive human instincts: survival and getting a good deal. While fewer people in the U.S. face food insecurity than most other places in the world, there is a natural tendency to want to make sure there is always enough food. If we can couple that desire with getting a good deal, then dopamine is presumably released and the shopper feels a rush of satisfaction or pleasure.
One approach is to place a limit on the number of individual items that can be purchased. The natural tendency for many shoppers is to hoard the maximum amount as if suspicious that there are not any more cans of diced tomatoes in back. Removing the dollar sign from the price helps disconnect the shopper from the economic cost of putting the food item into the cart. So while I pushed the tiniest cart available around the store, carried a specific shopping list, and avoided the stand-up displays, I was no match for the diced tomatoes. Three cans went into the cart. Who knows, maybe there will be a terrible Vermont snowstorm and I will be happy that I have a dozen cans in the basement.
Noted by WVR, MD
*This filler excerpt can be found in the January 2012 Pediatrics print journal p.54, or via online here.
