Part 1: The Grocery Store Based on the book “What to Eat” by Marion Nestle
The grocery store as we know it can be a very overwhelming place with an overabundance of products. This overabundance leaves food companies with three options: 1. They can make fewer products or smaller portions and raise prices, 2. They can entice you to buy their products instead of their competitors, or 3. They can get you to eat more of what they sell. Competition for your food dollars has led food companies to develop marketing strategies that help them to sell more food and encourage you to eat more, strategies that encourage you to eat more food whether or not you need it include: convenience: if a food is easier to take with you and eat, you will eat more, ubiquity: the more places food is available, the more food you will eat, proximity: if a food is close at hand, you will eat more of it than if it is harder to get, frequency: the more times a day you eat the more you will eat, variety: the more foods that are available, the more you will eat (buffet syndrome), larger portions: the more food in front of you the more you will eat, and low prices: the cheaper the food, the more you will eat. An astonishing 300,000 plus edible products are for sale in the US and any large grocery store might display as many as 40,000 of them. The big companies that own most grocery stores want you to do as much searching as you can tolerate which is why the aisles are long and everything you actually need seems to be at the other end of the store. You are forced to go past thousands of other products on your way to get what you need. Grocery stores say they are in the business of offering choice. Perhaps but they do everything possible to make the choice theirs not yours. If you belong to a grocery store's discount shoppers club the store gains your loyalty, but gets to track your personal buying habits in exchange. This research tells food retailers how to lay out the stores, where to put specific products, how to position products on shelves, and how to set prices and advertise products. Grocery stores want to expose you to the largest possible number of items you can stand to see without annoying you so much that you run screaming from the store. Grocery store design follows fundamental rules, all of them based firmly on extensive research: place the highest selling food departments in the parts of the store that get the greatest flow of traffic—the perishables like meat, produce, dairy, and frozen foods generate the most sales so you put them against the back and side walls, use the aisle nearest the entrance for items that sell especially well on impulse or look or smell enticing–produce, flowers, or freshly baked bread–these must be the first things customers are to see in front or immediately to the left or right, use displays at the ends of aisles for high profit heavily advertised items likely to be bought on impulse, devote as much shelf space as possible to brands that generate frequent sales, the more shelf space they occupy the better they sell, place high profit center aisle food items sixty inches above the floor where they are seen easily by adults with or without eyeglasses, place store brands immediately to the right of those high traffic items so that the name brands attract more shoppers to the store brands too, avoid using islands–these make people bump into each other and want to move on–keep the traffic moving but slowly, do not create gaps in the aisles that allow customers to cross over to the next one unless aisles are so long that shoppers complain–if shoppers escape mid aisle they will miss seeing half the products along that route. The grocery store is an intense real estate market where every product competes fiercely against every other for precious space. You can see the products most easily at eye level, at the ends of aisles, and at the checkout counters, these areas are prime real estate. Which products get the prime space? The ones that are most profitable for the store. The stores create demand by putting some products where you cannot miss them. What about Walmart? If a food company wants its products to be in Walmart it has to offer rock bottom prices. Low prices sound good for people without much money, but nutritionally there's a catch. Low prices encourage everyone to buy more food in bigger packages. If you buy more you are likely to eat more. For example: a 2 liter container and the special for members 6 pack of 24 oz bottles were less than half the cost of the equivalent volume in 8 oz cans. Grocery store managers say this kind of pricing is not the store's problem. If you want smaller sizes you should be willing to pay more for them. But if you care about how much you get for a price you are likely to pick the larger sizes. And if you buy the larger sizes you are more likely to drink more of it. The choice is yours but anyone would have a hard time choosing a more expensive version of a product when a cheaper one is right there. You have to be strong and courageous to hold out for healthier choices in the grocery store system as it currently exists. Research says about 70% of shoppers bring lists into grocery stores but only 20% adhere to them. The additions are in store decisions or impulse buys. Grocery stores hope you will: listen to the background music–the slower the beat the longer you mosey, search for the “loss leaders” (items you always need but at a discount)--the longer you search the more products you see, go to the bakery, prepared foods, and deli sections–the sights and good smells will keep you lingering and encouraging sales, and taste samples because if you like what you taste you are likely to buy it.
