[HN Gopher] Gruen Transfer
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       Gruen Transfer
        
       Author : thinkingemote
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2024-06-11 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | moritzwarhier wrote:
       | So familiar in German grocery and drug stores, it's not even
       | funny.
       | 
       | There's s tangent to be made about the internet and social media.
       | 
       | Unlocking my smartphone feels kind of similar.
        
       | mminer237 wrote:
       | > It is named after Austrian architect Victor Gruen, who
       | disapproved of such manipulative techniques.
       | 
       | That's cold. I quite wonder why.
       | 
       | Nevertheless, I found this article extremely difficult to read.
       | Its "Description" barely describes it, seems to contradict
       | itself, and somehow just makes my head hurt trying to parse it.
       | Is this attempting self-exemplification?
        
         | ClassyJacket wrote:
         | I always heard this explained simply as supermarkets putting
         | milk at the back so you have to walk past a bunch of other
         | stuff to get it.
        
           | cool_dude85 wrote:
           | There's a few good books on the psychology behind this kind
           | of thing in retail by Paco Underhill. Best, I think, is Why
           | We Buy.
        
           | marcod wrote:
           | I feel like that is a separate effect... making you walk past
           | items you might want to get you to buy them vs intentionally
           | confusing you so you forget what you came in for in the first
           | place, which makes you more susceptible the the previous and
           | many other effects.
        
       | PyWoody wrote:
       | I hate stores that adopt this.
       | 
       | I go to the more expensive grocery store in my town simply
       | because they never move anything. I can get my staples,
       | vegetables, and eggs at the pace of a brisk walk. I'm in and out
       | in under fifteen minutes.
       | 
       | They did move the organic section once about ten years ago.
       | People still bring it up.
        
       | zmmmmm wrote:
       | I worked at a grocery store in my teenage years and a couple of
       | times a year we were enlisted to shift entire segments of items
       | to different isles. The owners were quite transparent: every time
       | they did it, they got an uptick in sales that lasted much longer
       | than you would think (like months). The effect of people
       | wandering around trying to find the item they needed inevitably
       | leads to them stumbling on other things and buying them on
       | impulse. And I think those "impulse" buys were often much higher
       | margin than whatever they came into store to buy in the first
       | place.
       | 
       | Another bizarre thing was positioning items right on the edge of
       | the shelf, as if they are about to fall off. Apparently this
       | creates some kind of psychological impulse as well.
        
         | cool_dude85 wrote:
         | >Another bizarre thing was positioning items right on the edge
         | of the shelf, as if they are about to fall off. Apparently this
         | creates some kind of psychological impulse as well.
         | 
         | This practice was called "zoning" where I used to work. It was
         | explained to me that people think the shelves are more full and
         | will report in surveys etc. that the store has a better
         | selection.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-11 23:00 UTC)