The other night I was in my local grocery store looking to buy some milk and other essentials. As I flew down the cereal aisle to get to the diary section, I stopped in my tracks noticing this strange looking price on a box of Kelloggs cereal.
I don’t know why I stopped to look but the price was just bugging me – $3.01 As I stood in the middle of the aisle I kept asking myself why $3.01? Wouldn’t $2.99 be more appropriate, or even $3? What’s with that extra penny?
Then it hit me. There was no particular reason for the extra penny in the $3.01 price. The store set the price at $3.01 to deliberately to cause me to do what I had done. To make me to stop in my tracks. Let me explain.
Every single space in your supermarket is designed to get you to buy. Grocery stores have mastered consumer psychology to get us to purchase items we never intended to. In fact, studies indicate that between 40-60% of all of our store purchase are impulse buys.
Grocery stores understand that we go into the store with a specific list, whether mental or physical, of the things we want to buy. We develop a sort of tunnel vision with our sights set on obtaining what we need.
Supermarkets look for every chance to break this tunnel vision. They want you to pay attention to something you didn’t have your mind on when you entered the store. They purposefully set out to distract you, to make you lose focus. Have you ever gone into a store for a few items and come out with a cart full of items? Then you know exactly how powerful this distraction can be.
Supermarkets have devised an impressive arsenal of ways to snap us out of our tunnel vision – to get us to pay attention to something we wouldn’t have thought of when we walked in.
The most common are sales items with phrases like “sale”, “bargain”, “special”. Yet, we can become immune even to these sales signs and stickers. Next tactic – small sales flags which stick out ever so slightly from the store shelf hoping to break your tunnel vision. If a consumer is immune to these sales tags, why not try plastering a product advertisement right on the supermarket floor. Shopper tunnel vision still not shattered, stores have stand alone displays in their arsenal. These small product containing displays jut out ever so slightly into our walking path causing us to take notice.
Now supermarkets seem to have added another tool into their arsenal. The price itself!
We are awash with prices ending in even numbers, or in 5’s, 7’s and 9’s. Think $1.99, $3.95, $ 4.95, 2 for $4, 3 for $10, $2.99, 3.49, $4.97, $5.95, or $2.00
Then along comes a price like $3.01. It just doesn’t fit into the normal pattern. It doesn’t want to seem to play along with the others. Like the girl with the punk hairdo and nose ring at the opera it begs to be noticed. And noticed it is. This is exactly what your supermarket wants you to do. They have interrupted your tunnel vision. They have temporarily taken your mind off of what you intended to buy.
So in the future it seems that we can expect more atypical prices. More $2.17, $4.01, $1.16, and $1.53s. Next time don’t try to figure out why they are priced that way. Take it for what it is, another in a long line of supermarket distractions designed to get you to buy more than you intended.
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