The Christmas shopping season is wrapped up, and the Boxing Day (which now is more like a boxing week, if not a boxing month) is right around the corner, so we soon will get that satisfaction from catching great deals.
Many people are planning to travel to find the best deals and save some money in hypermarkets in Regina, Minot, or even Saskatoon, maybe Brandon or Winnipeg. But before you make that decision, you should read this column (it might be just a reminder for many of the readers, but the message merits repetition).
Even though some buys during sales feel quite incredible, in reality, the only place you find the free cheese in is a mousetrap. And if the cheese is really, really cheap, then something is probably off about it.
But it’s quite obvious that nobody likes losing money, including big retailers, which significantly drop prices at designated promotion times. So what do they do?
When you cruise through aisles with your shopping cart on your own, you feel that you have the freedom of choice, freedom to buy things, and freedom not to buy things, right? Wrong. What feels like low-pressure shopping, in reality, is a very well designed quiz with a lot of hidden traps.
So what are some of the main store traps that we usually get caught into?
Hypermarkets have anything a household may need nowadays, and their goal is to ensure that customers spend as much time as possible inside. Each place probably has its own system and some tricks but most of them do their best ensuring the main points of the store are at least somewhat away from each other. The unavoidable areas are the entrance, tills, and the most attractive showcase, located away from each other. Each of those areas is designed to have enough catchers for customers, who usually slow down or stop there.
Sale items are usually spread out all over the place. And the basic items are also distanced so that while shoppers are pushing their trolleys from bread shelves to the dairy department they would go by some attractive sweets, kitchen appliances or sale-piles.
The beautiful fruits and veggies are traditionally by the entrance to help you feel good about your habits. Statistically, after we grab our portion of vitamins, we are more likely to buy more snacks and other craving satisfiers.
Besides, a somewhat chaotic placement of products on the shelves (which gets changed on regular basis) also ensures that you spend some time staring at it, looking for what you need and along the way picking up some other items that stand out, thanks to those screaming, usually yellow sale tags.
The items that need to be sold are usually placed on middle shelves. Statistics shows that we became too lazy to bend and look at what’s on the bottom (even if it’s the best deal, most of us won’t notice it).
Furniture stores are another type of jungle, which actually organize their space so one cannot pay for the pillow they came for until going through the entire place and viewing everything they have on display. Guess what, during the sales season most of the shoppers end with at least two or three extra sale items in their cart after travelling through those colourful, exciting and seemingly cheap corridors.
Another trick, I think, stores of all kinds borrowed from casinos. Have you noticed that there are hardly any windows? And if there are, they are covered with big banners. Why? So we don’t realize how much time we spend in the store and get disconnected from the world outside. Unfortunately, it often gets me caught.
And even knowing about these other tricks, when at the store most of us just relax, forget and fall for the great deals (which is fine, as long as it’s not hurting us and our families).
But if you are thinking about heading out somewhere for shopping think twice. Because a week or two after your satisfactory great deal trip, you’ll find a bunch of already bad groceries in your fridge that were really cheap, so you took three. And half a year later there probably will be a few unpacked boxes still sitting around the house with stuff that was too good of a deal not to buy, but too useless to unpack.
So if you really need something, check some of the local stores. They also will have some deals, but knowing the place you are less likely to get in a trap. And you also will keep the money in the community rolling into a new decade.
Merry Christmas! Shop smart and shop local!
