Marion Nestle

The more products you see, the more you're likely to buy.

Therefore, the products that are organized so that you cannot miss them are

are in prime supermarket real estate, and companies pay the supermarkets to place their products at eye level, at the ends of aisles, those have a special name, end caps, and at the cash register.

When you see products at the cash register, they're paying fees to the supermarket by the inch of space.

And that's how supermarkets make a lot of their money, is through slotting fees.

And, of course, what this does is it keeps small producers out because they can't afford to make those kinds of payments.

Because these payments are pretty expensive.

Very expensive.

I mean, we're talking about thousands or, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And every single product that is in a supermarket is placed where it is for a reason.

There is research – I mean, what I can't believe and just can't get over is the amount of research that goes into it, the amount of consumer research, focus groups, camera research.

I mean, every kind of social science research that you can think of is used to plot out how people are going to walk through the stores, where the items are placed, what people are going to see.

what they're most likely to buy.

And what you want to do, of course, is you want to place the most highly profitable items where they're going to get the most viewers.

And it's not – the joke is, of course, if you want a bottle of milk, you've got to go to the far corner, the furthest corner from the entrance.

The purpose of that is not only to keep the milk cold –

because the refrigeration is along the wall, but also to get you to walk through the store, preferably through as many aisles as possible.

Well, and also there are studies that are done where they put cameras where they watch customers and just watch what people do and set up different experiments within the store and check the way people respond to them.

The purpose of a supermarket is to sell as much food as possible to as many people as possible, as often as possible, at as high a price as they can get away with.

I can't say that enough.