Christy Williams
Dr. Huston
English 1301
September 28, 2014
Thank You for Shopping With Us Customers must take several precautions when shopping, especially those on a budget. There are traps all over the stores, from the parking lot to the meat department. Some of the pretty well hidden, some are quite obvious. Grocery stores use several marketing tricks and strategies to get customers to spend more money in their stores. Walk into Kroger, the smell of rotisserie chicken fills the air. This lures the customer to deli, but he came for milk. By the time he gets to the milk, he has a rotisserie chicken and macaroni and cheese. How did this happen? In most Krogers, and other grocery stores, the deli is located in the front of the store. Therefore, the first thing you see and smell is deli food. The milk is almost always located in the back. So the customer has to walk past different types of merchandise to get to it, encouraging him to buy more than he intended to buy. Occasionally, a grocery store will rearrange their merchandise. The purpose of this is so the customer will have to search for what they came in for. The customer enters Tom Thumb to buy chips, noticing the store is looking a little different. She goes to the last aisle the chips were on, but to her surprise this is now the baking aisle. She walks all they down the aisle and spots a goldfish shape snack box and grabs it for her son’s lunch box. She goes to the next aisle to find the newest Oreo cookie---in the basket. Finally she reaches her destination and gets her Doritos and a cheese dip. Tom Thumb won that round!! The “sale” or “on sale” sign can be deceiving. How about “buy one, get on 50% off” sale? The store is actually raising the price of the buy one and the customer will probably pay close to the original price for 50% off item. For instance, the sale is for drumsticks that