Just remembered. I think it was my Mom who told me about the bread aisle thing. Store managers generally don’t like to make things hard for little old ladies. 
I haven’t seen this done in Costco, nor Target (although they did just remodel our Target, so a couple of sections did get swapped around – but otherwise, everything’s been in the same place for at least a decade.)
My local grocery store, though, drives me fricking batty. It feels like they move stuff around every four or so months. One day, the lettuces, carrots, and celery are on the south wall of the grocery section; a few months later it’s on the north wall. The specialty ethnic vegetables used to be on the east end of the south wall; now they’re on the west end of the south wall, and some are in baskets in the middle of the store. It’s always treasure hunt trying to figure out where they put the ginger this week.
And then there’s the random shuffling around of parts of aisles. For the most part, the soda and juice aisles have remained where they’ve always been, but everything else seems to have moved around plus or minus up to 2 aisles. For a few months, the condiments were on the north side of aisle 7, about halfway down; then they moved to the south side of aisle 6, at the east end; and they’ve made other such trips in the meantime. Heck, even the prepackaged part of the meat section, the location of the chicken, beef, and pork will shuffle around at least once a year.
Drives me nuts.
It drives everyone nuts. Stores do not like unhappy customers. So don’t believe the myth that stores move it all around just so you cannot find your items and have to hunt. It’s silly.
From the linked article
“Most of our regular items stay in the same spot. The things that move are seasonal — furniture, flowers and holiday decor”
Which sort of runs counter to the headline of the same article, but that’s common in our clickbait world.
I can’t find any rhyme or reason why they do it, but this particular grocery moves stuff constantly.
I can’t find any rhyme or reason why they do it, but this particular grocery moves stuff constantly. Trust me, visit this store three times in a year, and you’ll find the ginger in three different location.
I posted about this store about two and a half years ago. The locations of all the items have since changed. The green peppers are back on the left wall, and the lettuce on the right wall (actually, not quite; most of the lettuce moved back to the right wall, but the iceberg lettuce stayed on the left wall. Before, they were all in the same section.) The bread has moved back to being against the fridges. But the peanuts have moved to yet another aisle since then. Much of the time, they didn’t even bother changing the aisle signage. You can go in the store right now and see some items have been moved around based on just looking at the aisle signs.
Ahhh, the ginger. I’ve been rolling my eyes at this thread, thinking “Oh, just walk around til you find it, or ask someone.”
But finding dried/crystllized ginger will get me so frustrated. I need it for motion sickness (I get that walking, turning a corner, even typing the term), but no store knows where to put it.
I just imagine a store manager: “Do I put it with the dried fruit? It sort of looks like dried pineapple, but isn’t ginger a root? Like turnips… I’ll put it with the produce! Oh, it can be used to put in cookies, Baking Aisle! No, then M&Ms would go there, too. Wait, we’re Trader Joe’s, we’ll hang it from a divider between the trail mix and the mixed nuts!”
Find a store that has a bulk food section for the ginger.
Would this be the proper place to complain about running into a store and buying 2 to 4 items and ending up with a receipt that is 18 to 24 inches long? Because there are two drug store chains in my area that do this.
The marketing strategy for wholesale clubs is different from regular stores. They’re based on high volume traffic and sales. They don’t want people browsing and lingering (which they tend to do anyway). That extra 10-20 minutes spent in the store for an extra $100 in sales, could mean lost or delay of $1000’s of dollars from a frequent bulk buyer. Go to Costco between 9-5 and you’ll see more people with flatbeds of stuff than shopping carts. In the evenings and weekends, the opposite is tru.
Also, unlike supermarkets and regular stores where the profit margin can vary per item (though groceries are almost always very low margin), warehouse clubs have a set max markup (15% for Costco) for all their items.
+1 to this!
Why do I need a coupon for a product similar to what I already bought? :smack: Of course back to targeted marketing, but I find it funny that get coupons for beauty products. Ummm…I’m a guy and the only thing related to beauty products I buy every few years is clear and black nail polish. Great for sealing and blacking out things.
Ummm…yeah, that sounds like a good reason and I’ll stick with that story! 
I work at a store. I have even worked in the area that does the shuffling. Yes, they DO deliberately reshuffle the store so you will spend more time in it looking for stuff. Yes, they know it annoys you, but it generates sufficiently more revenue that the trade-off between more money and annoyance comes down on the side of “make more money”.
I also work in a store and we do not reshuffle here or at any other grocery store I have worked at in order to make it hard for a customer to find a product. We move things for the season, to bring in new products, to adjust to changes in the retail preferences of customers, to draw attention to new products etc. In other words, the store is adapting to changes in the retail world and consumer preference in order to increase profitability. We want the layout to be the best for the current retail food environment. We do not intentionally want you not to be able to find the bread crumbs.
What can I say? Different stores do things differently.
Sure, that’s what I end up doing, but, crap, I go to this store about 3-4 times a week, so I get used to products and where they are placed, and it just throws my rhythm off when they keep moving things. Seasonal stuff I understand, but like why the fuck is the bread sometimes in the last aisle, sometimes in the next-to-last, and then sometimes in the floor section by the deli? And why are all the condiments in aisle 8 for six months, then aisle 7, then aisle 7 on the other side? This has been driving me nuts for years because I literally am at this store about 150-200 times a year. And it’s pretty much just this particularly store that does it to this degree. Others may have minor shifts of product once in awhile, but this one entire sections get swapped out for who knows what reason.
As I stated above, two sides of the same coin, and both sides are heads. Unless you run an independent supermarket or store, layouts are planned and dictated from above and based on extensive market research.
The head’s side of the coin (and the National Geographic cited above (as well as other articles) supports what Bioptop states and customer experience and feedback supports Broomstick states. The end result is the same, the customer’s perceptions and buying patterns are being manipulated and taken advantage of.
As for customer satisfaction, it plays a smaller part in marketing decisions than profits. I talked about a prime example somewhere on this forum before. When I worked at OfficeMax, regular cashiers were told that market research showed that if you asked a customer three times if they wanted a store credit card they were more likely to accept. One cashier did that and got more sign-ups than anyone else. He also got more complaints about his pushiness more that anyone else.
If customer satisfaction and shopping convenience was the prime metric for how stores did things, they’d put the bacon, eggs, hash browns and English muffins all next to each other and they wouldn’t put the candy and soda (which kids see and nag about) next to the checkouts.
It’s probably the store is trying to boost it’s impulse sales and the demographics point to frequently moving things around does that. As I stated above about 7-11 stores, there’s no one strategy that works for all stores in all locations. However, there are certain things that are standard for all virtually all supermarkets, produce near the entrance, eggs and milk at the rear and bread in the first or second aisle regardless if you start from the left or the right of the store.
Would be interesting to also find out just how many of his customers vs. those of more polite cashiers simply downed their items and left the store empty-handed because of behavior this offensive and obnoxious, or how many might have completed one purchase but never returned to that store because they didn’t want to deal with this again, or both.
You cannot put eggs, bacon, hash browns and English muffins next to each other. Perishables are in refrigerators and thus must be close to the back area where the perishables are kept. Frozen items must be a short distance from the back freezer. The idea is that stocking of perishable and frozen items must be swift so the items stay in proper temperatures as much as possible. Meat is a separate department run by different players. Bread will usually be near the Bakery. Impulse items like candy and cold drinks are going to be by the area people are most likely to have the impulse to buy them: at checkout. It’s not just kids that decide they need a Pepsi and a Snickers. You want to hear people complain? Try taking away their register candy and sodas.