Supermarket Psychology

By Kenneth Chat

Have you ever wondered about how supermarkets are organised? The supermarket is the modern cornucopia, where anybody can stroll in and trade special pieces of paper for food. Gone are the days when even the rich had to struggle through famines. But with capitalism comes, well, capitalism. Supermarkets are organised in ways that make you spend more money, even if you don’t realise it. To show you these ways, your reporter travelled to two local supermarkets of the same chain.

Walking up to your local supermarket, you first see the deals at the entrance. The brightly-coloured perishables with huge discounts are on full display, drawing you into the supermarket to hopefully pick up a bunch of stuff. Sure, you don’t need those extra oranges, but didn’t the pantry seem a little empty the last time you opened it? Might as well buy some more; after all, there’s a discount! (Spoiler: there’s always some discount.) 

In other categories, too, the deals are also at the front. Most people don’t have a preference for a particular brand of soy sauce or oil; can you tell the difference? We just go for what’s cheap, which often means buying various “deals” — in reality dirty tricks like “two for one”, which nudge you into buying more than you need. The three-litre jugs of peanut oil might seem enticing, but if they give you food poisoning, you now have 2.99 litres of unusable oil. Pyromania, anyone?

To get past the bad discounts, you go deeper into the store to find products.  But you’re falling for the second trap: essentials are placed at the very back, so supermarkets make you walk past many products you might not need. Something will catch your eye and make you think, “whoa, maybe I’ll try something new.” And, well, this technique is pretty much the only reason people buy prepackaged dim sum. There is nothing redeemable about cheese-stuffed tong yuen. 

Western supermarkets stagger the bread, eggs and milk, because those are the essential foods of Western culture. However, in a Southeast Asian place like Hong Kong, most people’s diets are based on rice and eggs. You can see how, in both images, the meat and veg blockade the eggs, while the rice and noodles are protected at the back. Ditto with the snacks—Cantonese buyers will walk past the chocolates to get to the chips. 

The same concept applies to shelves. Companies can pay a placement fee to place their products in certain places — so American candy producers cough up as much as HK$40mil to get onto the shelf next to the checkout. If something is at the end of a shelf or eye level, it’s easier to see and get. Humans are lazy, and you subconsciously don’t want to bother going into the supermarket—especially if the supermarket is crowded. 

Now that you’ve gotten what you want, you go through the last section, the nonperishables. But why are the nonperishables last? Well, supermarkets need to change the perishable stuff fast—apples will rot in several days, while toothpaste can wait for several months. Moreover, if you want something like a trashcan, you’d usually desperately need a new one—so you’re willing to walk more to get to the nonperishables. 

Similarly, that’s why the pet food and baby stuff is in the back. Most people buying staple foods don’t need those items, but most people buying pet food also need food for themselves. In other words, supermarkets force you past items you might have a chance of buying. They silently contrast their full stocks with your half-empty fridge.

So, how do you avoid being tricked by supermarkets? The usual advice is to have a concrete shopping list. However, this isn’t foolproof. Even if you know what items to buy, the supermarket can impact what brand you choose—especially if there’s a particularly steep discount. In fact, brands also try to influence that choice through a constant barrage of television adverts.

We tend to relate impulse buying to that one friend who buys too many snacks. But impulse buying runs far deeper. You probably don’t follow an extremely strict diet — unless you’re a bodybuilder — so when you walk into a supermarket, you vaguely know to “get some meat”, or “get some veg”, or even “get something for dinner”, but you don’t have an exact list. 

Sure, you can do a cost-benefit comparison using nutritional information. But nutrition isn’t the only factor. There isn’t any way to objectively quantify whether Sanada eggs taste better than Unionsum eggs, whether that ‘Organic’ label is worth ten extra dollars, or whether you deserve a Kit Kat after a tough day at school. What you buy is influenced by how supermarkets order their items. 

Whether you’ve lost money depends on your point of view; you might enjoy eating gold leaf, or shark fin, even though both are tasteless. That point of view is affected by the world in general—including the constant bombardment of advertisements on every television break and street corner. Perhaps that raises a bigger question: If you’re paying for the experience of the brand name when you buy an overpriced product, is consumerism good? To what extent can we know whether we should buy something? That’s a question for TOK, and something you might want to consider the next time you’re waiting in a long checkout line