Tactics Of The Supermarket : Prime Real Estate

On my food shopping trip, I went to my local grocery store, Sobeys. Capitalist consumer values such as convenience was evident throughout this food shopping trip. For instance, having built a grocery store in the center of a bunch of neighborhoods makes it a quick trip to get to this grocery store. Since it is a close drive for myself and others in the surrounding area, it created sportive financial gain because it is convenient for people to get to. Predictability is a large part of this shopping experience. Having gone to Sobeys for several years I already have an expectation of where I need to go in the store to find exactly what I need. For example, I was buying Almond Milk by a specific company that I know this location carries, and

* Sales reps secure the best product placement in stores, conducting taste tests in stores and convincing “individual store managers to pull the product from the central buyer.” (Singer, 2008)

Malcolm Gladwell’s piece, “The Science of Shopping”, causes his audience to fear retail anthropologists such as Paco Underhill. On the surface, Gladwell appears to write a short documentary of sorts about the manipulation of businesses and stores. Venturing deeper into the story provides the reader with vision of the importance businesses place on their layouts and strategies. Gladwell continues to assure his point that consumers are not mindlessly obeying what retailors want them to do. Store owners are required to accommodate to how their customers behave, and what their target market wants. Gladwell refers to significant moments with Underhill by directly quoting Paco. He also vividly describes different aspects of Paco’s practice.

A famous writer for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has written an article, “The Science of Shopping”, which is based on Paco Underhill’s study of retail anthropology. The intention of a retail store is obvious- that is to attract customers and convince them to perchance as much as they can. There is so much knowledge that we can study, such that how the environment affects people’s thinking. These are tiny details that we don’t usually think about. The reason of how Paco Underhill success is because he notices these details. Details determine success or failure. Paco Undnerhill—a talent and passion environmental psychologist, provides us a new point of view of the science of displaying products,

Whenever I go to Stop & Shop, I tend to take interest in the thousands of products that surround me as I walk down an aisle. The wafting aroma of freshly baked pastries and the sight of cold soft drinks are just some of the things that trigger my appetite for food. Most often, I find myself buying more than what I originally planned on. That’s exactly what the layout of a supermarket tries to make consumers do. Marion Nestle argues in her article, “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate”, how supermarkets employ clever tactics such as product layout in order to make consumers spend as much money as possible. She covers fundamental rules that stores employ in order to keep customers in aisles for the longest time, a series of cognitive studies that stores perform on customers, and examples of how supermarkets encourage customers to buy more product. Overall, Nestle’s insight into how supermarkets manipulate people into spending extra money has made me a more savvy consumer and I feel if more people were to read her article, then they can avoid some of the supermarket’s marketing tactics as well.

Shopping has become a daily activity which happens a billion times in America and around the world. We cannot imagine how our lives would be affected if shopping was suddenly stopped. Malcolm Gladwell and Anne Norton both write articles about two sides of modern day shopping: how consumers have impacted the retail industry and how the industry influences consumers. In the article " The Science of Shopping," Malcolm Gladwell, a well-known writer and journalist, analyzes the shopping behaviors of customers and how retailers can lure customers; while Anne Norton, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, in

Whole Foods is a great example of democratic approach to store operation. In this organizational environment all team members have the ability to insert their input in decision making that affects their product/service area in addition to having input in store matters as well. Whole Foods has a stringent screening process potential employees are put through to ensure that the applicant is a good fit for the organization. Once an applicant is hired, they are assigned to a team and team leader, who then train the new team member to be knowledgeable on the product/service they are assigned to. Additionally, they are also trained on providing friendly customer service. Due to Whole Foods approach to using workplace democracy, it has created a positive

Have you ever wondered why retailers have you leaving with more items than you intended to have? It is all because the marketing strategies that have been outlined in the stores that the consumers don’t even notice. In the texts, Power of Habit: Why We Do What We do in Life by Charles Duhigg and The Science of Shopping, Malcolm Gladwell explain how companies target consumer shopping habits and the significance of marketing. While reading through Duhigg and Gladwells texts, I had made a trip to Target and analyzed how they strategically market to their consumers and discovered that they are very effective in employing the Invariant right, shopping gender gap, sandwiching and Guest I.D.’s. One of the most effective strategies is the Invariant

For generations, Americans has been brainwashed by the media to believe that what is displayed on television is the ideal perception of what real beauty have manipulated American citizens of what style looks like. Furthermore, with their many brainwashing strategies, that means more and more consumers spending beyond their budget. Our perspectives have been heavily influenced by what they believe is nice, but can we afford it all? With unrealistic combination of goods in store, plazas, and mall, consuming has become a bad behavior of some. In support of my argument of the “Overspending”, author Gladwell’s article “The Science of Shopping” also argues that stores adjust to fit the needs and wants of the shopper are evidently presented. With that being said, we have no idea when we are being manipulated into unrealistic shopping behavior that is influenced by the way the advertisement is presented in visual sight. Author Gladwell gets a “retail anthropologist” and “urban geographer” named Paco Underhill to give breakdown points of how he helps brand name stores influence consumers into persuasion of buying more. However, most of us fall short of that discipline, while being persuaded to overspend during our store visits.

Publix Super Market. Describe the type of business market, its business share, financials, size and global presence.

Consumers have certain behavioral tendencies when faced in certain situations. In Why We Buy, the author Paco Underhill details certain behavioral characteristics people tend to have in different types of retail stores. Many consumers don’t think about what their actions mean when checking out or buying products. But to Mr. Underhill, the gender of the person, the people they’re with, the amount of times the person touches an object, the amount of time spent on checking a particular product, the time they came in, and the time they leave, all factor into a database to determine different behavioral trend consumers have. It is these trends that they find in order to correct a problem a store or retailer didn’t know they have to increase sales and create a better flow in the store environment.

The grid organization of both grocery stores helped people easily find what they needed while encouraging people to buy more items. The signage is also another factor that influence customers wayfinding and shopping satisfaction. Festival food particularly had very good signage. Each different districts of the grocery store was well marked and each aisle was numbered and had overhanging signs with the type of items that were in each aisle. Similarly, Capitol Centre Market’s aisle were also labeled, however, the signage was minimal can make it difficult to find the product people needs. The minimal signage, according to the customers we interviewed, was compensated by the fact that their employees were helpful and knowledgeable about where things are. It is also important to keep in mind that Festival Foods is a significantly larger grocery store than Capitol Centre Market so the signage for the two different stores varied. Overall, most of the interviewees were easily able to find the items they needed with the help of signs, organization, and employees.

Desire has helped build and form what we know today as the modern department store. The idea of wanting something you don’t already have has continually been a driving factor of modern consumerism. Many aspects have influenced consumerism and desire; visual displays within the large windows of department stores have constructed the way in which we desire and consume goods. A window display works by drawing a consumer in towards a store showing them items that they do not necessarily need but have a desire or a want for, leaving a consumer with a want to go inside and purchase the items of which they desire. The interior displays and layouts also influence consumerism and desire. Within the spaces of consumption itself have major impact on the way in which we shop; they are designed to lead us around a certain path, and place similar items next to each other to tempt us into buying more.

This paper is a company analysis on Giant Hypermarket Malaysia in general, but specifically focusing on Giant Hypermarket Sabah. Giant Hypermarket is a major supermarket and retailer chain in Malaysia. It is a subsidiary of Dairy Farm International Holdings (DFI) and is headquartered in Shah Alam, Selagor. In this paper, firstly we focus our analysis in identifying the Strength-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) of Giant; in addition, we constructed a SWOT Matrix for Giant where we identified the SO, ST, WO and WT strategies, which we think Giant should apply to improve their competitiveness. Next we focus our analysis on the external as well as the internal analysis on Giant. In the external analysis, we center our

What convinces shoppers to plummet to a particular marked item in a store passageway? What is it about bundling that provokes interest? Unordinary basic outline? Striking representation? Contemporary way of life symbolism? An unmistakable brand personality? Odds are shading pulls in individuals first.