What supermarkets don’t want you to know

Discover the tricks supermarkets use to encourage you to spend more on your weekly shop.

Do you always seem to come away from the supermarket with a couple of items that weren’t on your shopping list or having spent more than you had intended when you walked into the store?

This probably isn’t an accident and, in fact, you may be doing exactly what the retailer expects of its customers.

With this in mind, we reveal five of the most common supermarket tricks.

Changing layouts

As well as being inconvenient for regular customers, changing the layout of a store is a ploy to encourage shoppers to spend more time searching for their items and probably spending more money.

While you’re traipsing through the aisles looking for a carton of semi-skimmed, you might be tempted to pick up a six-pack of your favourite lager.

Dynamic pricing

You might logically assume that supermarket chains have one price for every item that is applied across all of its stores. Unfortunately not…

Most supermarkets follow a practice known as ‘dynamic pricing’ in which they set prices according to regional trends. This means you’ll probably pay a higher price for your groceries if you live in a wealthy area than you would in other parts of the country.

The eyeline trick

Retailers often place their more expensive, branded items at customers’ eye level, while placing less costly alternatives on top and bottom shelves.

In order to boost their profits, supermarkets spend millions of pounds analysing shoppers’ behaviour and psychology. Based on this research, they know we’re much more likely to opt for items right in front of us than scour the shelves for a cheaper deal.

Dodgy price drops

Imagine you’re in a supermarket and see that an item that had been £6 has been reduced to £4.99. Clearly this is a bargain, right? Not necessarily.

Supermarkets often temporarily inflate the price of goods before putting them on ‘sale’. This way, they can advertise the new price against the previous, inflated price to give the appearance of an attractive saving.

This practice is perfectly legal. As long as the supermarket has charged the higher price for at least 28 days prior to the sale, retailers can market this as a price cut.

Does size matter?

Supermarkets are fond of telling us we’ll get better value if we buy our food in larger portions. You might therefore assume that a 1kg tub of butter will offer better value overall than a 500-gram tub.

However, it may work out cheaper to buy two smaller packs. In order to form an accurate comparison and find the most competitive deal, it’s worth comparing the price per 100 grams.

**This material is for information purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. We strongly encourage our readers not to rely solely on this content, but to seek independent advice when making financial decisions.**

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