Filling Carts.

Today’s Marketing Cookie is about meeting a deeper need in the grocery isle.

All I can say is, thank God my wife does the shopping for our family! If you’re smart, you’ll never send me to the grocery store for a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter, because I’ll come back with 15 bags full of stuff. Like a cat attracted to laser pointers, I am drawn to every “buy one, get one free” deal and end up with two of everything I never knew I wanted.

You’d think that as a marketer, I’d be wise to impulse buying prompts, end cap displays, one-day deals, and other must-have promotions designed to increase my average transaction value. Grocery stores are perfectly engineered to fill my cart and empty my wallet. Essentials like milk and bread, which I was supposed to pick up quickly, are placed way at the back, and at opposite ends of the store. They force me to navigate through aisles packed with shiny non-essential items, and of course the most expensive stuff is all at eye level. By the time I push my cart through the checkout, I’ve even been known to completely forget to buy the one thing I originally came there for in the first place.

When it comes to my impulsive behavior at the grocery store, it isn’t those great deals, or savings that are really attracting me to throw random stuff in my cart. I might use those BOGO deals as an excuse to explain why I bought four boxes of cereal we don’t like, Italian dressing we already have, and random blocks of imported cheeses, but the deals are only the means and not the cause. Why the heck am I filling my cart with more stuff than we need when I only meant to come in and buy a greeting card?

Although I’ve never talked about this with anyone qualified to assess or diagnose it, I did eventually notice and question what was going on with me at the market. I’ve come to realize that filling my cart with excess is probably my way of compensating for periods of scarcity and household food insecurity I experienced during my childhood. It makes sense to me, and being aware of this, whether my assumption is accurate or not, has helped me to be much more intentional when I do go shopping, simply by making a list.

I don’t know if others throw random stuff in their carts like I do or if an empty fridge as a kid plays a part in why they do it. But I hope that my little story this morning can be helpful to someone else. In the meantime, with some self-control and a lot of help from my wife, I hope to follow the advice in today’s fortune as it says, “Buy things because you need them, not because they are on sale.”