You go into the supermarket planning to buy a few basic necessities to last you the week and spend about twenty dollars but come out with a cart filled to the top with things you didn’t realise you needed and fifty dollars out of pocket. Sound familiar? It is all too easy to overspend at the supermarket and there are several reasons for this.
The main reason people overspend is because supermarkets want you to. Supermarkets are not interested in saving you money, they are interested in making you spend more and they use a variety of clever tactics to ensure this happens. These vary from country to country, depending on the culture the store is trying to manipulate.
The layout of the store is designed specifically to get people to buy more. In this country (the UK) most supermarkets start off with the fruit and vegetable section, moving on to dairy, tinned and dried food, and household cleaning products, and finishing off with the freezer section, then snacks, and finally drinks.
This is because people start off their shopping trip with good intentions and fresh produce gives a healthy impression. Buying extra fresh produce is not treating yourself, it is planning for a healthier week, or so you tell yourself. Then you get your necessities and finally deserve treats in the form of ice cream, packs of peanuts, and wine. Extra treats such as sweets, magazines and chewing gum on sale near the checkouts are there for the same reason.
Special offers, beautifully arranged seasonal displays, and various free samples also have the same purpose. You are being manipulated into buying far more than you planned and the way to avoid this is to make a list, and stick to it. Having a time limit might help too, as this means you want be dawdling around all those enticing and exotic new foods.
The regular rearrangement is done mainly to get shoppers lost. The longer you spend looking for what you need, the more likely you are to get other things. The store might claim that they are ‘improving their layout’ each time. They aren’t. They are shifting the sections about so shoppers have to spend more time, and hopefully more money, in their store.
People also overspend for more personal reasons. Shopping when hungry leads to people buying far more food than they can eat. The expression ‘to have eyes bigger than your stomach’ has a lot of truth in it. The sheer variety of goods in a bigger supermarket is also going to lead to temptation, even without the cunning techniques mentioned above being a factor. If you like cheese then seeing two hundred different kinds will entice you into buying more than that plain block of cheddar.
There are several ways to avoid overspending. A list and a time limit help. If you find it extraordinarily difficult to avoid temptation then consider shopping online or leaving credit and bank cards behind. If you only have that twenty dollars in cash then you simply can’t spend any more. It also helps to avoid shopping with children, when you are hungry or thirsty, and when you are feeling emotional. We need to eat. We do not need to spend most of the household budget on unnecessary items from the supermarket.