Grocery stores are pulling out all of the stops these days to try to get as much of your hard earned money as they can. If you often find yourself coming out of the store with more items than you planned or spending more than your budgeted, then chances are that you have been a victim of one of five little grocery shopping tricks.
In a previous blog, I covered the trick about limit sales, and how they can affect your shopping decisions. If you missed that article, you can click here for all of the details: Five Little Grocery Shopping Tricks: The Limit Sale.
Today I’ll talk about how the stores steer you toward products that they want to sell, usually the items that are the highest price or give the biggest dollars back to the store for product placement fees.
Shelf placement is an amazing bit of marketing science. Marketing people gather into rooms and hold endless meetings about how to get you to buy more because of where items are on the shelf. I’ll talk more about this in a future blog in this series, but for now let us look at the simplest form of this trick, which is also the most effective. All it is is this: the most profitable items for the store are always placed at eye level. The best bargains are usually high up on the top shelves and not easily reached, or on the bottom shelves where you are less likely to look. I always shop these out of the way areas, especially for canned, jarred items or dry goods, such as pizza sauce, pasta, rice, beans, soup, etc.
Top and bottom shelves also usually contain discontinued brands and products. Sometimes you can find these items on the clearance carts, but often they are there on the shelves, marked down to 50 percent or less of the original retail price. So the next time you go shopping, aim to find at least one bargain on the top or bottom shelves.
Click here for more articles by Mary Ann Romans.
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Grocery Gift Cards Can Save You Money
A Guide to Salvage Grocery Shopping
How Much Did Groceries Cost in the 1980s?
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