Your food shop is probably the largest category of spending after rent and bills. Knowing how to save money at the supermarket is going to save a significant amount of money.
However, you shouldn’t go without the things you enjoy or cut back on healthy nutritional products. By understanding supermarket psychology you can by-pass the supermarket tricks costing you money and influencing you to buy things, that deep down you don’t want or need.
Willpower Won’t Work When Trying To Save Money At The Supermarket
It’s no use trying to apply a sense of willpower when you are at a supermarket, if you play their game you will ultimately lose. Millions of pounds and dollars of research have been put towards understanding how to drive consumer behaviour.
The supermarkets can understand, predict and influence customer behaviour based on even the smallest of factors. For example, a few degrees change in the weather or the colour packaging of a product.
The first steps to understanding how to save money at the supermarket is to become aware of the supermarket tricks and then take action to avoid them altogether.
In order to do this, let’s walk through your supermarket experience together and each step of the way to identify how you can save money at the supermarket at each step.
1. Planning Your Trip
The first step of any supermarket journey should be to decide what you need and write a list. This will save you time in the supermarket, which in itself could save you from buying 50% more items.
This approach will give you a direct and logical approach to your walkthrough of the supermarket and this can prevent you from wandering the aisles buying groceries that you don’t actually need.
Supermarkets will actively try to induce this pattern of behaviour to increase your basket size.
This research has identified that the longer you spend in the supermarket the less rational selectiveness you will have, and ultimately you will buy more things that you don’t need.
How To Plan Your Shop
One way to go about this is to meal plan 3-5 days of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Using this meal plan you can decide on the ingredients you need and categorise them into groups e.g. vegetables, meal etc.
Remember to also select some treats that you know you are likely to buy, this will prevent you from too much impulse buying or feeling guilty when you treat yourself to chocolate, cookies, sweets etc. I use google keep to create a checklist of items that I need.
2. Choosing Your Basket Size
Upon entering the supermarket you will have a choice or basket, small trolly or large trolly. When making this decision, you need to be aware that doubling the size of the shopping cart leads to the shopper buying 40% more. So, depending on your list you need to make a conscious decision around what size you will need.
This effect is well understood across industries, for example, smaller plate sizes in restaurants can influence feelings of fullness. Buffet restaurants love this as it stops people from eating as much, you will notice that there are always very small plates available in these types of establishments.
Remember to select the smallest and most appropriate basket or shopping trolley based on your checklist of ingredients. Don’t select the largest trolley just in case you might need it.
3. Entering the Supermarket
Immediately upon entering the supermarket you will notice these fresh flowers and colourful vegetables. The flowers and fruit and veg are also used to prime you for freshness making everything else seem healthier and if you buy them first, you will be more likely to splurge on unhealthy foods such as chocolate to balance the equation. This behaviour is known as moral licensing.
Supermarkets take great care in how even the colour or shape of their products influence consumer performance. Research data has shown that bananas with Pantone colour 13-0858 (otherwise known as Vibrant Yellow) are less likely to sell than bananas with Pantone colour 12-0752 (also called Buttercup).
Pantone is one grade warmer, visually, and seems to imply a riper, fresher fruit. As a result, products are bred and planted in conditions vital to producing products to prime you.
How To Break Supermarket Priming
There are three actions you can take here, one is to stick to your list, walk around the supermarket the opposite way to what seems logical or habitual. You can also leave the fruit and vegetable group of your list until the end of your trip.
Habits are powerful and if you don’t have a new plan to disrupt your usual shopping habits, you will fall into a regular pattern of behaviour that the supermarket has induced you into. This will cause you to spend more money.
4. Controlling The Environment
Interestingly supermarkets can also prime you to feel greater levels of trust in a product or influence purchasing behaviours.
For example, music has even been used to influence the customer to select german or french wine and classical music played in the background of wine stores influences shoppers to spend more and buy more expensive items.
Music and aroma have also been shown to increase shopper pleasure levels, which in turn positively influences time and money spent and satisfaction with the shopping experience, with music tempo also influencing shopper behaviour.
Create Your Own Environment
Perhaps you might want to consider wearing headphones and playing music or an audiobook to influence your own environment. In a post-covid world, maybe we should continue to face wear masks to block out any strong aromas.
5. Choosing Your Item
Products in the eye-level space will often be more expensive and brands often pay for this space. In addition to inducing less price resistance, supermarkets can increase the number of sales using product position.
For example, a leading coffee manufacturer in the UK identified, using data science, that the location of a product on a certain shelf has a +/- 23% – 25% increase or decrease in sales.
Research has also identified the middle or eye-level shelf is the optimal position for optimal sales. There have even been eye-tracking studies that influence where the place a price should be.
How To Get Better Value For Money
Make a conscious effort to avoid eye line shelves to save money, and instead look at the bottom shelf, as this is often where the best value for money can be found.
You should also attempt to try alternative options to the familiar brands, that you are less price-sensitive to. Instead compare ingredients and see which you are actually getting better value for money for.
6. Avoiding Price Traps
There are also visual cues in stores, especially supermarkets, where price reductions and special offers are highlighted yellow. Sometimes there will obviously be good deals when a store needs to shift items.
However, most often this is a form of price anchoring which takes advantage of how we anchor prices to make a decision.
A popular UK tour operator has had the same £100 off per person since at least 2015. Customers will always see this as a discounted price, even though it’s actually the base price, especially new customers.
Always Price Compare Again Similar Products
Price anchoring is because it takes advantage of the first piece of information (the original price), which then makes the actual price seem much cheaper.
Always try to compare the discounted price to a competitor and/or always benchmark the product discounted price against similar products and look for the best value item.
Discounting Schedules
You will find that product discounting runs on cycles because the business legally has to provide evidence that there was a full price value, but often the discounted price is actually the regular price.
If you keep a mental note of how frequently or how much the price is discounted by, you will become aware of this, and you can also buy the item with the discounting schedule.
The customer analytics of supermarkets know a significant amount about you and understand which customer segments are likely to buy the product at full price vs those that will be triggered by discounts. Therefore, regular discounting schedules are used to increase frequency and margin of sales.
7. Checkout & Impulse Purchases
Ever noticed that supermarkets always place sweets, treats and small ticket items around the check-out?
Whilst your willpower is focused on waiting patiently in the queue and your attention is fatigued by all the product selections, you will be feeling tempted. After all, what’s a few extra pounds or dollars on some chocolates or chewing gum.
You can anticipate temptations like this before your shopping trip by making sure you don’t go shopping on an empty stomach. You could even eat sugary things like chocolate or orange juice, as this will give you the dopamine kick in advance.
Therefore you will be less likely to buy treats and last-minute checkout products because you will already have both anticipated and had some feel-good food.
11 Tips & Hints To Help You Save Money At The Supermarket
Knowing how to save money on at the supermarket can be tricky. Grocery shopping is unavoidable and you frequently have to place yourself at the mercy of the supermarket environment. An environment that has been carefully designed with decades of research and mass insights from data.
These environments take advantage of our very basic human instincts that drive us to overindulge, after being constantly primed by advertising. It’s far too easy to go into a store to buy fruit, only to come out with a chocolate cake.
11 Extra Tips To Help You Save Money At The Supermarket
- Meal plan for a few days
- Create a checklist of items that you need.
- Select the smallest basket or shopping trolley appropriate
- Walk the opposite way round the supermarket to what is logical or habitual
- Leave the fresh fruit and vegetables until last
- Avoid eye-line shelves
- Try alternative options vs familiar brands.
- Avoid price anchoring by benchmarking the discounted price against other products
- Be aware of discounting schedules that might trigger your purchases
- Time your purchasing with discounting schedules
- Don’t shop on an empty stomach
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