They’re messing with us at the grocery store again. According to the New York Times, marketers have discovered that messy stores make people buy more stuff.

Store managers had already mastered the trick of moving stuff around so that just when you’ve got your grocery list routine down, the cereal is where the soup used to be, and you wind up buying soup and cereal, along with the chips that just caught your eye.

At big box stores like Costco, they make items disappear altogether just when you’ve become addicted to them. That delicious raspberry-chipotle barbeque sauce? Gone, but there’s a three-pack of Orange-mustard, Spicy Kiwi and Caramel Poppyseed, in quart jars. Yuck, but maybe….? You buy those instead.
Now stores large and small are cluttering up their aisles and jamming their floor space with more stuff.

Face it, in all areas of life we are becoming like 5-year-old T-ball players, distracted by the dandelion or bumblebee as the softball whizzes past. The pull of the Iphone, the ping of the text, the crawl on the TV screen – we succumb to these things even when supposedly listening to a loved one, completing a project at work, driving a car. Most of us are hopelessly distracted. As shoppers, we’re doomed. Can you see the marketing opportunities?

Piling more stuff in the middle of the grocery aisles – enough so we feel obligated to buy some of it, having just knocked 27 boxes of rice pilaf mix off the pile with our carts while texting – this is genius, yes, but only one of many possibilities.

1) If shoppers believe goods are less expensive when they’re crammed into extra aisles and jumbled into big messy bins, imagine what they’ll think if some—but not all – of these goods are damaged! Store managers, go ahead and dent a few cans, tape some boxes shut, tear a couple of labels . Customers will grab up all the undamaged items, knowing they’re getting such a deal!

Completely unrelated items should be mixed in the same bins. If a baby toy is in a pile of handbags and men’s underwear, it must really be a good buy!

Grocers could also vastly increase the amount of impulse buying at their stores by using basic principles of set design:

1) Into each aisle, create a false floor that can be lowered and covered over with a panel identical to the floor.

2) Stack groceries high on the false floor, and when no one is in the aisle, make the stack disappear!

3) Raise the floor again with different items in the stack. Eventually customers will think they’ve lost their minds. They may go through the aisle multiple times, both to check their sanity and to grab items from the stack. Never knowing if the items will be there the next time, they’ll grab them while they can!
We customers could revolt, and do all of our shopping online. We’d click only the items on our list. Then we’d see that customers who bought those items also bought…