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Comment by hyperpallium | Hacker News Reader

> Wrigley started out as a soap salesman in his native Philadelphia. After moving to Chicago in 1891, he began offering store owners incentives to stock his products, such as free cans of baking powder with every order. When the baking powder proved a bigger hit than the soap, Wrigley sold that instead, and added in free packs of chewing gum as a promotion.

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Chewing gum reduces appetite. I take one before entering a supermarket, and it ensures I will not buy anything I don't need.

I like shopping for food when I'm hungry. I will buy more food, which leads to less shopping in total.

Ancidotal but whenever I shop hungry I buy a lot of junk food, and those costs really add up. I shop at Walmart though which is notorious for subconscious advertising so that might be a pretty big factor

The problem is you buy crap you aren't actually going to eat.

my strategy is to only go shopping at supermarkets when i have recently eaten a decent meal, and i already have enough food back at home to survive with out needing to go grocery shopping for a few days. that way i only buy bargains, and reasonably often dont buy anything at all. it helps to live close to multiple supermarkets, and have too much spare time.

> my strategy is to only go shopping at supermarkets when [...] and i already have enough food back at home to survive with out needing to go grocery shopping for a few days.

Great strategy, but if you ever have interruptions that cause you to empty out the larder, you will then starve since you can't shop.

Oh, wait... you're probably a human being not a computer program. Sorry: it's a kind of a reflexive code review process for me by now.

“Oh no! I Waited too long! I’m slightly too hungry to leave the house!”

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/time-of-useful-conscious...

> "...and reasonably often dont buy anything at all..."

Yes. But time has a cost. The reality is, leaving empty handed is a loss.

As for bargains, that's the key. Buy big when X is priced low.

Buy big when X is priced low.

Unless having lots of X at home will lead to you consuming more X at a faster rate than you normally would.

What are you talking about? I would nev-

Where did all my pistachios go? I bought like 20 pounds.

And gained 40.

I was thinking TP and such. But maybe having more TP makes me shit more? I'll have to set up a spreadsheet :)

That may apply to certain things, but I'm not going to use more napkins for the heck of it.

You could just make a list and stick to it.

It's quite easy to influence your lizard brain's urges and impulses directly through a one-time action, and much harder to manually override them through continuous conscious interference.

You can minimize the effort. I only go down isles that have what I need, so I can skip a lot of stuff without thinking about it. I avoid looking at the racks at checkout or areas that don't have what I need which again means I don't need to exercise self control.

Don't forget supermarkets stacks the stuff you don't need but may buy on impulse at the end of isles, meaning you still have to pass them.

This is where the ancient Stoics come in handy. I still struggle mightily with these kinds of things every single day, but we are animals, after all. It is certainly a lot easier for me than it was before I started studying stoicism, though.

Some gum makes the right decisions a little easier.

A list removes the need to decide at all.

I hate supermarkets so usually get in and out as quickly as I can. Often that means not getting some items on the list. I mean sure I've occasionally picked up stuff that hasn't been on the list but that's usually because it's something that should have been on the list but was forgotten about (eg milk or eggs - basics that get used frequently in a family home). However the times I walk out not buying stuff on the list far outweigh the times I've walked out with additional stuff that wasn't on the list. So I've never understood why people need such complicated systems to reduce supermarket spending like those described in this thread. But I guess everyone is different and perhaps some people like shopping and are prone to impulse buying?

I love food shopping and can easily spend an hour in my favorite food stores. Just roaming the isles, seeing what looks fresh/good/interesting that day and trying to come up with what I could use it for. I'll often head to the store to just get eggs and milk, leave with $80 of groceries and come home realizing I forgot the milk.

You're just lucky that you have an archipelago for a supermarket.

I see supermarkets as having 100 years of A/B testing to make sure that you don't stick to your list.

These include strategic floor layouts, the smell of fresh bakery goods such as bread and cakes, special offers, slow music, reduced lighting, fresh produce first, eggs in strange places, expensive products at eye level, and of course, the items in the checkout.

Having a shopping list does help. It's the sticking to it I'm curious to how easy that is.

I'm comfortable pitting my self-control against supermarkets' century of A/B testing.

Their 100 years of A/B testing has no effect on my wife.

Alternately, they have years of testing how to present things to shoppers like me, where "stick to the list" is never a hard and fast rule, but there's a conscious desire to browse a bit too.

I wonder what the overall frequencies of different customer behaviors, there, are...

I don't understand... Even when I'm starving, that's not going to make me buy boxes of strange items at the grocery store... Now, if I was at a buffet, that's a different story.

Because most grocery store items are pre-packaged or raw, they don't even register in my mind as consumable food until I put the work in to cook them.

I end up buying cookies when I'm hungry (I don't usually buy them)

This reminds me of 37Signal's [1] & ZachHolmans [2] talk about Your Product is your Byproduct. Real eye opener on how to think about what you're building and/or identify cross promotion etc.

[1] - https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products

[2] - https://zachholman.com/talk/product-is-the-byproduct/

Reminds me of how McDonalds is really a real estate business.

This realization is how Ray Kroc came to own McDonalds instead of the original founders, Richard and Maurice McDonald.

And then, I guess, he switched up to selling the gum...

Yep, that was the implication.

It could be fun PR stunt for an anniversary or whatever if they started to hand out bars of soap with sticks of gum...

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