Location, location, location: How supermarkets influence the foods you buy

SALT LAKE CITY – It’s happened to all of us: While waiting to pull out into traffic, you’re so focused on oncoming cars you don’t even see the pedestrian just about to cross in front of you.

Or you open the fridge to snag a condiment, and you’re so focused on the top shelf that you completely miss the bottle of ketchup sitting on the shelf below.

Inattentional blindness

It’s called, “inattentional blindness,” and it’s what a magician counts on for sleight-of-hand tricks, such as when they make a coin “disappear” in the palm of one hand and then pull it out of your ear with the other.

You are so focused on one thing, you don’t notice what else is happening in front of you.

And when it happens at a supermarket, it could cost you money when you’re shopping.

Shelf positioning

“As a shopper, it’s really important to look around,” said Trae Bodge who runs TrueTrae.com – a consumer website offering tricks on how people can save, which often comes down to understanding the tactics used against us to get us to spend more.

One of those tactics is shelf positioning. Bodge says food manufacturers often work with stores to ensure higher-priced items are featured at the center of a shelf, often at eye-level.

“They want the consumer to have their product right in front of them, so the consumer chooses that item versus another item,” she said.

While there may be dozens of options for a particular food item, we’re often drawn to the stuff that’s right in front of us and miss the lower-priced options often right above or below what’s at front-and-center.

“So rather than just looking at the eye level as a consumer, it’s really good to look high and look low,” Bodge said.

Testing the strategy

Look high and look low – could busting inflation be that simple?

KSL Investigative Producer Sloan Schrage and I put together a list of items that typically come with a variety of options: pasta, canned soup, peanut butter, rice, cooking oil, canned tuna, flour, instant noodles, spices, and canned beans. And then we went shopping.

Right away, we found examples proving the strategy of product positioning to be true. Eye-level garbanzo beans at Harmons priced out at $2.18. But looking up, we found cans from a different brand at less than half that price – $1.25. Looking down a few shelves, we found cans of garbanzo beans selling for only a $1 a can.

At Walmart, we found another example of the strategy in an aisle for instant noodles. At eye-level, we found a premium brand priced at $4 for a pack of four meals. But on the bottom shelf, we found the same $4 would buy you 12 meals from a competing brand of noodles.

In the cereal aisle at a Smith’s, the bigger boxes were getting the prime position on the shelves – the ones marketed as “Giant,” “Large,” or “Family” sized. Cereal sold in smaller containers were placed on lower shelves. Technically you’re paying less per ounce for the big boxes, but you’re also paying more to get out the door.

Looking high and low didn’t always pay off. Spices didn’t seem to vary much based on shelf placement. The premium, higher-cost soups tended to be placed way up high in glass containers, out of the reach of children.

At all three stores we shopped, tuna fish from a variety of brands and price points were more-or-less placed at the same level. Interestingly, the more expensive seafood options got a good shelf: location, location, location.

After an afternoon of investigative shopping, we found, indeed, we mostly saved by looking up and down – and with most examples, by a significant amount.

“If you compare the ingredient list, it might be identical,” said Bodge of store brand foods that often tend to be the hardest to reach. “They’re often made in the same factories, and you now just saved significantly.”