The Supermarket : Prime Real Estate

We have all been to a supermarket or store at some point in our lives. Have we found ourselves placing items in the cart that we did not come to buy, and why is that? Is there a reason the products we need are located in the back of the store? Marion Nestle wrote an article entitled, “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate.” She teaches in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University. Nestle writes a column regarding food for the San Francisco Chronicle. Shortly after reading the title, one can determine Nestle opposes supermarkets. “Prime Real Estate,” indicates that large supermarkets are feeding grounds for them against unsuspecting customers. Supermarkets can determine what somebody will buy, based on where the store places certain products. The general argument made by Nestle in her work, “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate, is that supermarkets are taking advantage of our unconscious mind and we are purchasing products on impulse.

Malcolm Gladwell’s piece, “The Science of Shopping”, causes his audience to fear retail anthropologists such as Paco Underhill. On the surface, Gladwell appears to write a short documentary of sorts about the manipulation of businesses and stores. Venturing deeper into the story provides the reader with vision of the importance businesses place on their layouts and strategies. Gladwell continues to assure his point that consumers are not mindlessly obeying what retailors want them to do. Store owners are required to accommodate to how their customers behave, and what their target market wants. Gladwell refers to significant moments with Underhill by directly quoting Paco. He also vividly describes different aspects of Paco’s practice.

Marion Nestle, an author with a couple of published books and a teacher at New York University, dives into the how supermarkets encourage shoppers to buy more than they need in an essay taken from her 2006 book “What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating.” Nestle informs her audience of general shoppers on the topic of how supermarkets are prime real estate so that she can convince the audience that supermarkets do things to make more money by getting people to buy more. Nestle uses rhetorical strategies of having pathos, examples, and facts. Nestle begins her essay by utilizing pathos. She attends to the audience’s emotions by describing the mass amounts of choices shoppers must make when they shop and the stress that comes with shopping.

The truth is that as consumers we are prone to being taken advantage of and more specifically, ripped off. How this occurs is quite simple. It is the technique of persuasion that forces people to do things, believe things and in this case purchase things that are not necessary. Tactics to persuade people can range from rhetoric devices to the structure of the message itself. Rhetoric devices, such as logos and pathos, and the structure of the message come together to ultimately persuade people to buy into things that they normally wouldn’t buy. Pathos appeals to emotion and logos describes the idea of logical reasoning. Then comes the structure of the message itself which enhances an idea to its full potential. The main purpose of these techniques in literature is to serve as writing strategies to convey an idea in words. Two examples of authors utilizing writing strategies to persuade readers that stores and advertisers manipulate shoppers take place in “The Science of Shopping” by Malcolm Gladwell and “Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell” by Clifford and Hardy. The author of “Attention Shoppers” uses the writing strategies of pathos, logos and the structure of the writing better than the author of “The Science of Shopping” to persuade readers that stores and advertisers are manipulating shoppers.

This Story takes place in 1961, in a small New England town 's “A&P” grocery store. Sammy, the narrator, is introduced as a grocery checker and an observer of the store 's patrons. He finds himself fascinated by a particular group of girls. Just in from the beach and still in their bathing suits, they are a stark contrast, to the otherwise plain store interior. Though it takes place over the period of a few minutes, it represents a much larger process of maturation. From the time the girls enter the grocery store, to the moment they leave, you can see changes in Sammy. At first, he sees only the physicality of the girls: how they look and what they are wearing, seem to be his only observations. It fascinates Sammy because he has never seen any girls like that come into the store especially Queenie. As they go about their errands, Sammy observes the reactions, of the other customers, to this trio of young women. Sammy wants to get out and do what teenagers do while on summer break and not just work in their parents store. In “A&P”, the social class and society expectations come hand in hand depending on the symbols throughout the story, in fact it allows the readers to get a full understanding of what went on in Sammy 's “World”.

Marion Nestle, a teacher at New York University, examines how supermarkets are designed and how the design affects consumers in her essay “The Supermarket: The Prime Estate”. “Nestle teaches in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health” (496). The essay was published in one of her numerous books, What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating in 2006. Nestle investigates the strategic method behind the store’s layout in this essay for the average consumer. Nestle portrays the manipulations of supermarkets to sell the most products possible to consumers through the store’s order and design through logos, pathos, and cause and consequence in the development of her essay.

Ever walk into a store with a defined list, but still get other items you never intended to get? Well, in Marion Nestle’s article “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate,” Nestle goes into detail about how the supermarkets in your daily life uses many tricks to get you to buy items and spend money. Nestle claims that supermarkets and their managers study habits of shoppers to gain the control using certain tactics. According to Nestle, “This research tells food retailers how to lay out the stores, where to put specific products, how to position products on shelves, and lastly how to set prices and advertise products” (Nestle 498). Some tactics that Marion Nestle mention are product location, music, and even item size. During the course of my paper I will convince you that these tactics are in fact real and bring more to your attention. Us consumers have to stick together and this is the first step.

Shopping has become a daily activity which happens a billion times in America and around the world. We cannot imagine how our lives would be affected if shopping was suddenly stopped. Malcolm Gladwell and Anne Norton both write articles about two sides of modern day shopping: how consumers have impacted the retail industry and how the industry influences consumers. In the article " The Science of Shopping," Malcolm Gladwell, a well-known writer and journalist, analyzes the shopping behaviors of customers and how retailers can lure customers; while Anne Norton, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, in

The UK supermarket industry resembles an oligopolistic industry, with several characteristics. Oligopolistic markets tend to be characterised by high concentration ratios, barriers to entry and…Since the turn of the century, the industry has been scrutinised by both the Office of Fair Trading and has been referred to the Competition Commission on two occasions. (Seely, 2012)

For generations, Americans has been brainwashed by the media to believe that what is displayed on television is the ideal perception of what real beauty have manipulated American citizens of what style looks like. Furthermore, with their many brainwashing strategies, that means more and more consumers spending beyond their budget. Our perspectives have been heavily influenced by what they believe is nice, but can we afford it all? With unrealistic combination of goods in store, plazas, and mall, consuming has become a bad behavior of some. In support of my argument of the “Overspending”, author Gladwell’s article “The Science of Shopping” also argues that stores adjust to fit the needs and wants of the shopper are evidently presented. With that being said, we have no idea when we are being manipulated into unrealistic shopping behavior that is influenced by the way the advertisement is presented in visual sight. Author Gladwell gets a “retail anthropologist” and “urban geographer” named Paco Underhill to give breakdown points of how he helps brand name stores influence consumers into persuasion of buying more. However, most of us fall short of that discipline, while being persuaded to overspend during our store visits.

Consumers have certain behavioral tendencies when faced in certain situations. In Why We Buy, the author Paco Underhill details certain behavioral characteristics people tend to have in different types of retail stores. Many consumers don’t think about what their actions mean when checking out or buying products. But to Mr. Underhill, the gender of the person, the people they’re with, the amount of times the person touches an object, the amount of time spent on checking a particular product, the time they came in, and the time they leave, all factor into a database to determine different behavioral trend consumers have. It is these trends that they find in order to correct a problem a store or retailer didn’t know they have to increase sales and create a better flow in the store environment.

There are a couple different themes that become very important when analyzing the Nestle Crunch Bar case. During the case, many research channels were used to find various themes and feelings residing within the consumer, conscious and subconscious. Between pages twelve and fourteen, multiple feelings/themes are presented. A couple of these have stuck out in comparison to the others, emotional comfort and enjoyment. These two themes seem to be present in the mind of the consumer through all of the consumer testing studies and also within the consumer throughout the entire purchasing experience.

Inside the front doors of a grocery store, customers are presented with a diverse, vibrant display of fresh fruits and vegetables. With its inviting rainbow of bright colors, the produce section leads past the wafting, sweets smells of bread and pastries in the bakery and through winding aisles stocked with an assortment of goods. Linings the aisles and fillings shelves are rows and rows of boxes of pasta, pre-made meals, processed foods, and more snacks and sweets than one would know what to do with. Grocery stores present shoppers with a myriad of choices. The shelves and displays are filled with a variety of different brands and options to choose from, which offers customers a tough and potentially stressful decision when shopping. However, before a customer decides upon a specific brand or item, whether that happens to be a name-brand product, competitor, or store-brand, they are faced with an even more important choice; they must first make a decision on whether they want to buy whole foods and produce, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and other healthy choices, or more processed “junk” foods like sugary drinks and snacks or enriched breads and pasta. Not only must costumers decide between specific brands and deals, but they must also choose which of these types of food is best for them and their interests. Consumers must constantly weigh the different factors that are presented when comparing foods; between price, ingredients, health, availability, and overall

Abstract The main purpose of this report is to make references to significant microeconomic models, in order to explain the supply, Demand, Market equilibrium, price discrimination, and Opportunity rate as well as making references to important macroeconomic aims which can be described with some examples such as growth, Inflation, Unemployment, GDP, exchange rates and many more, this two business economic topics are very relevant in today’s market as they represent the real-world meaning of the business area. This report will analyze both parties and evaluate any issues happening to date.

Nestle, an international recognized multinational corporation is the world’s leading nutrition, Health and Wellness Company. Nestlé’s mission of “Good Food, Good Life” aims at providing customers with the finest quality of nutritional choices within a wide range of food and beverage classifications (NESTLÉ - Vassos Eliades. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.vassoseliades.com/consumer-goods/nestle.html, para. 1). The merger in 1905 between Nestle and the Anglo-Swiss Milk Company created the Nestle we know today. Nestle is one of the world’s largest suppliers of food and nutritional products operating with 461 factories in 83 countries, with 328,000 employees worldwide (Fries, Lorin, Goldberg, Ray, 2012. Nestle: Agricultural Material