Supermarket Tricks

If you need a cake, don’t buy it the day you need it.
We’ll have to give you one from the display case, and those cakes have often been sitting out for a while. If you order in advance, we’ll make the cake for you that day or the night before, and it will be a lot fresher. — Lindsay Smith, former cake decorator and bakery worker at a grocery store near Birmingham, Alabama

Over 60 percent of shoppers off-load products as they check out.
So supermarkets started making checkout lanes narrower, with less shelf space, which means it’s harder to ditch goods at the last minute. — Martin Lindstrom

Reader’s Digest put together a list of supermarket tricks we all fall for (here is a link that will save you from having to click through a 50-slide slideshow), and a lot of it is interesting! I did not know the thing about the cakes, for example, and I’ve definitely bought cakes straight out of the display case many times. I have never ditched anything at the checkout lane though.

Photo: Joe Schlabotnik

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