Kim Vo entered the sliding glass doors of Dillons Food Stores, 4701 W. Sixth St., with the intention of buying only bread and eggs. Vo, Dodge City senior, saw an array of vibrant colors as she walked past the fruits and vegetables. The enticing aroma of chicken traveled from the deli section and into her nose. She walked past the fresh flowers displayed in a rainbow of colors. She continued down the aisles, placed a pan, drinks, straws and baby food for her 10-month-old daughter, Sadie, in her cart. The rich smell of freshly baked bread filled the air as she headed toward the back of the store. She placed a loaf of bread in her cart, continued browsing the aisles and added milk and laundry detergent. She arrived at the check-out counter and the cashier totaled her items. “I was supposed to grab eggs and bread, but I ended up spending $64,” Vo says.

Vo did exactly what supermarkets wanted her to do — she bought more than she originally planned. From the store layout to the placement of products, supermarkets use marketing tactics to get us to buy more and more expensive items. When you’re on a budget, being a conscious consumer may stop you from placing that last impulse item in your cart.

Supermarkets study consumer behavior because they want to arrange the store in a manner that’s convenient for their customers, says Michael Williams, professor of marketing and director of the Academy of Consumer Excellence and Sales in Oklahoma City, Okla.

Although supermarket layouts vary, most supermarkets generally follow a similar store pattern. Williams says stores are largely focused on making a good impression on the shopper’s pysche from the time he or she enters the store.

For example, in the Hy-Vee at 4000 W. Sixth St., the fresh produce is easily accessible and near the entrance. In recently built supermarkets, the fresh produce is generally near the entrance, followed by the deli and bakery section, the frozen meat is adjacent from the food aisles and the dairy section is located near the back.

Supermarkets are intentionally built this way to increase the chance that customers will buy more than they intentionally planned, says Michael Barr, professor of business psychology at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. He says retail stores create a “plan-o-gram,” or illustrations of where items should be displayed throughout the store.

From the moment you grab a cart at the entrance your visual and tactile senses are stimulated. It’s no accident that supermarkets place the fresh produce and floral section near the front. Barr says supermarket planners want an image that the store is fresh, inviting and pleasant. Imagine how uninviting the supermarket experience would be if plungers and toilet paper were near the entrance. The contrasting textures of fruits and vegetables and pleasent aromas of brightly colored flowers can help enticeconsumers to linger in the store, Barr says. “The more senses that you can engage in a person the more likely they are going to make a purchase,” he says.

Barr says supermarkets are also counting on consumers to enter the store hungry. If you shop on an empty stomach you may be more prone to placing additional products in your cart.

As you push your cart along the parameter of the supermarket, you are likely to come across the frozen meats section. If you are buying steak, closely examine the meat. Barr says consumers who typically associate the freshness of meat by its red color may be unaware that supermarkets use certain lighting, such as fluorescent bulbs, to distort the true color of meats. Although meat is naturally red, the lights enhance the vividness of the red. Instead of just glancing quickly at the displays, try picking up each package to examine the true freshness and color.

Across from the frozen meats section are the food aisles, but the end-cap displays distract you from even getting into the aisles. End-cap displays are products specially placed at the end of an aisle used to get your attention. You will notice that bottle of pop is not in its regular place on the shelf. An employee has gone to the trouble of arranging the product in an attractive manner.

Barr says people perceive the display as something special and will tend to pick it up thinking that it is on sale. He says sometimes the item is not actually on sale or it is sold only at a small discount. Some end-cap displays are purposefully cluttered next to large-sale signs, which give the appearance that there are more bargains within the store than there actually are.

Jason Kingman, Topeka junior, has become more aware of supermarket strategies such as the end-cap displays because he has worked at the Dillons Food Store, 1015 W. 23rd St., for two years. He works with store managers on product placement. He says an effective supermarket tactic is the limited-time only sales that create a sense of urgency. “Grocery stores are out to make money,” Kingman says. “It’s always a profit margin that’s the bottom line.”

He says that as a consumer he didn’t realize how responsive buyers were to a product being prominently displayed at the end of aisles until he started working there. “There will be a product that won’t sell for a couple of weeks,” he says. “And then as soon as we put it on special, put huge signs around it or put it on an end of an aisle it just starts flying off the shelves.” Each end-cap display is a company-wide strategic decision, he says.

Once you finally do turn into an aisle, there is a natural tendency to look straight ahead. More thought processes are involved in bending down or reaching up for a product, says Robert Gordman, author of The Must-Have Consumer: Seven Steps to Winning the Customer You Haven’t Got and president of the Gordman Group, a profit-development consulting group.

You may not realize that brands are also competing for your attention on the shelf space. The eye-level products are the premium space on a shelf. Gordman says that brands negotiate with supermarkets, sign a contract and pay slotting fees to have their product at a particular level on the shelf. He says the cost of a slotting fee depends on the number of branches the supermarket has as well as the size and type of product. For example, the slotting fee for cereal may cost more because it takes up more space on the shelf than a can of green beans. There’s also a reason your favorite chips are no longer in the same spot they used to be. He says items are periodically shuffled around on the shelf, which forces consumers to discover new products.

So, location of products is partially determined by the brand’s power. Next time you are browsing the aisles, make a conscious effort to scan the top and bottom levels to compare prices and products. “The key insight is that people generally want what they want.” Gordman says.

Megan Nguyen, Dodge City senior, says she doesn’t shop with a list and isn’t drawn to the sale items. “When I go to the store, I know what I want,” she says. “I don’t really care about the price.” But Nguyen says there was a time when her lack of budgeting caused her to overspend on groceries. She was shopping at the Dillons Food Stores, 4701 W. Sixth St., with the intentions of spending only $15 to make sandwiches. She grabbed a basket, vegetables in the fresh produce section, and, after she was enticed by the smell of the bakery section, placed donuts and bread in her basket. Then she made her way through the store aisles and placed pop, cereal and chips in her basket. “I look at everything — that’s why sometimes I actually forget what I need,” Nguyen says. Her grocery trip ended up costing her $60.

Like Nguyen, some customers follow the natural path of the store layout, which can cause them to buy more as they browse.

Once you walk out of the aisles, you’ll find the dairy section is near the back of the store. Supermarkets intentionally place milk near the back because it’s a staple item, says Michael Williams, professor of marketing in Oklahoma City. He says supermarkets force you to walk past other items before you reach the milk, which increases your chances of impulse buying. “If we have it in the front, people are going to run into the door, pay for it and leave,” Williams says. “They wouldn’t have had a chance to walk into the store and see other items they didn’t intend to buy.” Milk and bread are placed far apart from one another because supermarkets want consumers to walk past other items, he says.

Supermarkets are organized in a manner that is convenient for consumers who don’t do a lot of preplanning. “Our behavior as human organisms tends to be sort of like water,” Williams says. “We tend to seek out the route with the least effort required.” Items such as pasta sauce and egg noodles are next to one another, so you don’t have to scour the store for each item. Although you might not have a grocery list handy, you can plan a meal based on the store layout.

Once you make your way to the check-out line, you will find the candy and magazine displays. These are the impulse items, which are cheap and low-risk money-makers for the store. You may pick up that pack of gum as you place your items on the conveyer belt and the cashier scans the prices.

Williams says the register not only tabulates the cost of your groceries, the register also collects current consumer data for the retailers and suppliers. “Frito Lays knows what sold in every Target and Wal-Mart grocery store real-time, this morning as of sales yesterday, afternoon and evening,” he says.

Supermarkets also use the customer loyalty cards, such as the Dillons Plus Card, to keep you returning to their supermarket, Williams says. Card-holding members can receive discounts, special offers and coupons in the mail based on their purchases. The cards create an incentive to return to the same store and the mailed coupons allow for more personalized shopping. He says each time you swipe the card supermarkets use the data to track your buying habits from the amount of groceries to what brands you buy. Williams says collecting the data helps retailers and suppliers know whether they’re losing profit, wasting inventory or overspending on operating costs. Williams says the net profit of most supermarkets is slim at about 1 to 2 percent. “Any time they can add a few pennies to their net profit it really helps their bottom line,” he says.

The bottom line for supermarkets might be customer retention and profit, but understanding supermarket psychology as a consumer can save you money. “It all comes down to how much can we slow you down and get you to wander through different parts of the store,” Williams says. “If they can introduce some interference to our mission that gets us to look at other products, the odds of us picking up something that we would have not purchased otherwise are much higher.”