The supermarket is designed to lure customers into spending as much time as possible within its doors. The reason for this is simple: The longer you stay in the store, the more stuff you’ll see, and the more stuff you see, the more you’ll buy. And supermarkets contain a lot of stuff. The average supermarket, according to the Food Marketing Institute, carries some 44,000 different items, and many carry tens of thousands more. The sheer volume of available choice is enough to send shoppers into a state of information overload. According to brain-scan experiments, the demands of so much decision-making quickly became too much for us. After about 40 minutes of shopping, most people stop struggling to be rationally selective, and instead began shopping emotionally – which is the point which we accumulate the 50 percent of stuff in our cart that we never intended buying.
超市的设计就是为了吸引顾客长时间逗留。原因很简单：逗留的时间越长，你看到的越多；看到的越多，你买的更多。而超市有很多商品。食品营销研究所研究表明，一般的超市大约有44,000种不同商品，有些超市可能还要多几万个种类。这么多的选择已足够让购物者信息超载。通过脑部扫描实验，大脑决策强度之大，很快让人们无力承担。购物40分钟之后，大多数人放弃理性有选择地购物，开始感性购物——这就是为什么我们的购物车里50%的货物是我们从没打算要买的。