Friday, April 6, 2012

Supermarkets

Supermarkets are a very unique breed of stores in the United States, offering a wide variety of products. It is also a very competitive business and super markets are in constant competition with each other. A relatively new way to attract costumers that stores are now using is pricing popular items such as milk and bread at prices lower then their competitors. Once the supermarket has its common items at a low price the shopper will assume the store is cheaper in general. Once the store has the shopper under this impression they can raise the prices of the less common items and the costumer will not even notice. The best way for a store to influence purchases is by tracking a shoppers member card. Some supermarkets have come out with a device that you can carry around the store that knows you by your members card and what you buy. Once it has this information it will come up with coupons for the items that you usually buy while in the store. This gives the supermarket a lot of control over your decision making while you shop. Supermarkets use a couple of psychological tricks once you enter the store. They arrange the fruit to look more bountiful as well as more glamorous. They do this by stacking it on crates as well as having a certain lighting shine on it to make it look more attractive. Another trick of theirs is they have doubled the size of shopping carts in the past two years. Since doing this consumers have been purchasing double the groceries to fill the cart because they were used to filling the shopping cart each time they went grocery shopping. One more trick that supermarkets play is putting the common items such as milk in the back of the store. The affect of doing this it gets their shoppers to walk past all the other items and sale items in the store on their mission to just pick up one item. According to our text ethics are “standards of moral behavior, that is, behavior accepted by society as right versus wrong.” (Nickels, McHugh, 92). And by this definition I think supermarkets acts are unethical. Their main goal is to real you in with good offers but after doing so they try and make as much money off you as possible whether you need the items or not. Supermarkets are influencing what we buy more then ever now. They present items in a manner that makes you buy them on impulse because of a sale or the presentation of the product. Nothing about this seems ethical to me and I think it is wrong what supermarkets are doing.

1 comment:

  1. Hello friend, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog post and thought you made a lot of great points. First of all I completely agree with you about underpricing common food items such as milk and bread, in order to entice the shopper to buy other products from them as well. Second, it's a great point you made about placing the common food items in the back of the store rather than the front in order to force the shopper to walk by other items and displays that will hopefully catch the consumers attention. Finally, i believe the members card or discount card is a great tool for supermarkets to find out how often, how much, and what exactly you buy from them, in order for them to better accomodate you. Great blog post my friend, have a spectacular day.

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