Savvy Shopping
- ciaralitchfield
- Jun 18, 2014
- 2 min read
On average, Super markets spend £150 million a year on in store advertising. This doesn’t just come down to posters and offers but also includes the placements of items. Items are strategically placed in order to increase the amount you buy. These strategies pray on our tendency to impulse buy and it’s not usually an extra bag or two of apples you load in your trolley.....
9/10 shopper’s impulse buy either due to hunger or clever marketing put in place by the shops themselves. For example, items marketed at children e.g. cereals; tend to be lower down on the shelves where their bright colours and familiar characters can catch children’s eyes. The single packs of sweets and chocolates are near the till; they are in single packs so that your brain convinces you its ok to grab one or two, after all they are only small. Reducing the size (and therefore the cost) of items reduces the amount of time you put into making a decision of whether or not to take one. This leads to impulse buying. You feel like you aren’t harming your weight or your pocket by spending less than a pound on one chocolate bar, a whole slap may make you stop and think.
The best ways to avoid the urge to impulse buy are:
Make a list and focus on only the items on the list
Shop at a familiar place so you can go from 1 item to the next without walking up and down isles, thus reducing your likely hood of being caught on items you don’t really need
Shop online! Those who shop online tend to buy 55% less impulse purchases as a result.
Shopping when you are hungry is always a huge mistake! When we are overly hungry we crave high fat, high sugar foods to give you the quick hit of energy your body needs to sustain us for a short period, before leaving us to crash!
If you are feeling hungry before you set out grab a quick healthy snack at home to curb the cravings till you return. A recent study showed that people who went shopping hungry bough food with 300% more calories and 400% more fat than group who had eaten a health snack before leaving home. When asked to select items to make ‘lunch’ as a single meal the hungry group of participants selected a meal consisting of 2,500 calories on average, this is more than most should be eating in a whole day. The group that were able to snack picked much healthier options leading to an average intake of 700 calories. If you add this 700 to the average 370 calories eaten in snacks before shopping, their total is still much less at 1,700 calories.
This shows you should snack to control food cravings through the day and stay away from shops when you’re hungry. Stay organised and you will return home with a healthier trolley contents and maybe save yourself some money along the way!
