How Grocery Stores SCAM YOU!!

0:00Grocery stores are not necessarily in the food business. They're in the real estate business. Today we're going to talk about all the different tricks that they use to get you to buy things that you never intended on buying. I don't know if you've been to a grocery store lately, but there's a lot of junk food in those stores. It's becoming more difficult to find real food. 83% of all the calories in a grocery store have ultra-process food ingredients. You're being majorly manipulated when you go to the grocery store. So when people go to the grocery store with a certain plan, a little list, are they going to buy certain things? But they end up getting a lot of additional things. Well, I'm going to talk about why. Grocery stores, they don't really make as much profit as you think. It's like one to three percent net profit, which is on the low side. Most of that money is not from the markup on the products. Between 50 and 75% of their profit is from real estate.

1:00It's called sliding fees. Food companies or brands spend a tremendous amount of money on getting certain locations in that grocery store. So one product could spend between 10,000 to 100,000 up to a million dollars to get just one product on a certain shelf right in front of your eyeballs. There's actually a name for it. It's called the golden zone because they can sell eight times more product than if they're on a lower shelf. So that's where the majority of grocery stores make their money. So they're really into the real estate business. There's like 40,000 different products in a grocery store. And one of the goals is to put you in front of as many of those products as possible. So there's all sorts of tricks to get you to do that. One thing is that they kind of tailor-make things to people that are right-handed, which is basically 80% of people. So when you walk in the store, the orientation of the store is really counterclockwise because the people that are right-handed will be also looking to their right and also seeing the products on the opposite side.

2:04Stores oftentimes use smell. And these are artificial smells that are generated to simulate fresh bread baking in the oven. They also found that if they pump out the smell of citrus, they can increase certain sales of certain products by 23%. They even use different types of texture on the flooring to slow you down in certain areas of the store that have a higher margin. So you'll spend more time with your eyeballs looking at certain things. They will definitely put high-price items next to slightly lower-price items that have good margins to get you to buy those. They use certain colors for different things like blue, for example, increases the trust building, red, which is a sale, and then you have green, which will give you the sense that it's fresh. Also, they use social proof like bestseller or this product is our customers favorite product. Those little things alone will increase the chance of you buying it by 19%. Sometimes they'll

3:06put highly-demanded discount products way in the back. So you have to walk through all of the store to be able to get them. And of course, the chances of you buying other products are pretty high. There are so many people that go in a grocery store that buy things that they never planned on buying. They also found that in the wine section, if they put French music, people will buy more wine, like 15% more wine. Sometimes they'll actually take products off the shelf to create scarcity of certain products to actually get those sold. Because if you think about it, if you're walking down the aisle and you just see like one product left and there's nothing else like, hmm, I better get that before someone else gets it. Scarcity works. I mean, think about the snowstorms that they have, right? The day before a snowstorm, everyone's in the grocery store and they're just pretty much buying everything out because they think, oh my gosh, if it snows, I won't get to the grocery store, I'm going to die. I'm going to starve to death and that never happens. But the primary real estate for the entire grocery store is in this serial section. That's the area where they make the most

4:06profits, like 45% profit. It's highly competitive and a brand could spend up to a million dollars to get slotted for a certain good location in that section. Now, of course, if that serial is for children, which most of it is, the slotting fee would be most expensive at the children high level. I remember I was a kid. I would always want to go with my mother to the grocery store and I would pick out the serial with the best price, right? And of course, it was just filled with sugar. Back then in the early 70s, you know, we didn't have as much hyphurus corn syrup if any. I think it was just cane sugar, but still I consumed so much sugar growing up. It was crazy. I remember standing on top of the counter in the morning trying to find just sugar. And I would just basically have spoonfuls of sugar. I have certain genes that once I start, I cannot stop. Whereas my brothers and sister didn't do that. I had a problem. Of course, this one on all through college,

5:06I ate a tremendous monoposta, Doritos, Valvita cheese, and highly processed meats. Now, another interesting thing that happens in the checkout line is for every second that a person has to wait before they get checked out in impulse purchase is increased by 0.38 percent, 16 percent of all of the sales, the total sales of a grocery store is purchased in the front area. And that is the prime real estate for a brand. And they're paying no less than a million dollars per product per year for that spot. 87 percent of those impulse buys are purchased three seconds before they see the checkout person. They also have lost leaders. What's a lost leader? It's something that they break even on or even lose little money on to get people in the store. And a real common lost leader is milk, which is in the back of the store. So it forces you to go to the grocery store, buy that milk, get a good price, and of course, be exposed to a lot of other foods. And then you

6:11have another placement, which is called the end cap, which is at the end of the aisles. Oh my gosh, that real estate, for example, is very, very expensive as well. They also found if they price things at $3.99 versus rounding it up to the next number, they can increase sales by 24 percent more. Also, people that pay with a credit card are more likely to buy more junk food than if they paid with cash, thus the location, the checkouts next to the candy section. I mean, you have to realize that all the candy in the process foods have the highest margins. It's the most profitable for the store as well as the brand. 83 percent of all calories in the grocery store are alter process calories, which is just mind blowing. You have to really hunt and pack to find food in the grocery store. And I don't even consider it, ultra-processed food as real food. The sugar alone, as well as the starches will create very similar addictions to actual drugs. So let me just shift gears now to

7:15label trickery, right? When you look at the label of this product right here, it says, always organic, no artificial flavors or synthetic colors. What a beautiful label. I mean, these guys are literally pros at packaging. But if we look at the label, look at the total carbs, 78 grams of carbs with 42 grams of sugar. This product has wheat flour, cane sugar, invertecane syrup, palm oil, whole wheat flour, apples, right after the apples comes corn starch. This is the stuff that you use to iron wrinkled shirts. Then you get rice starch, dextrose, baking soda, vital wheat, gluten, tapioca starch. See how much starch is in here? And so you can see they added all these different types of sugars so they can actually put them lower on the label. But if you look at this, look at the numbers, 104 grams of actual product. 78 grams is sugar and starch. And both of those are really sugar. When you eat this, you would get

8:17over 1,200 calories of just a lot of sugar. But it's just slightly better than the normal pop charts. You can't trust these labels when they say natural or organic. They're mainly distracting you from the sugar. And also some of these starches, like multidextrin, which is highly processed, that's classified as a complex carbohydrate. So in your mind, you're like, oh, complex carbohydrates are healthy. No, not multidextrin. The other thing I want to mention is sometimes this processed food is fortified with vitamins and minerals. Right. You'll see that in cereal. Like that's some type of enhancement. No, it's not. All they're doing is they're giving you a little tiny bit of synthetic vitamins added back in. So that way you won't create a major disease. You're not going to get your vitamins and minerals by consuming whole grains. They take the whole grain. They grind into powder. It sits on the shelf for months before it ends up in your shopping cart. Well, do you think when they grind this grain that over time, the exposure to oxygen in light might

9:22destroy the vitamins? Well, guess what? That's what happens. But this is why they enhance it or fortify it with synthetic vitamins or at least a few. These all-to-process calories are designed to achieve what's called a bliss point. That is the amazing explosion of flavor and taste and sensation when you have the just-to-right amount of sugar, salt, and fat. And I want to just mention another thing about these ultra-process foods. They're not composed of a lot of saturated fat. It's all unsaturated fat as in the seed oils. As you can see, I'm sorry, the vegetable oils right here. Right here. You see all these vegetables right here. Here's another way they trick you. They think, oh, wow, there's vegetables in here. No, there's not. So this is what you need to do. Do not go to the grocery store with your kids, especially if your kids are tired and hungry. Do not go to the grocery store if you are hungry or tired. Go to the grocery store with your list and just don't buy

10:22anything else that's not on the list. Because when you buy that junk food, you then have to say no to it every day, every night. But if you say no right in the grocery store, you only have to say no once. You should chop in the perimeter around the grocery store. Don't go in the middle part where all the junk food is. Realize when you go in the grocery store, you're walking into an area that has 83% of all the calories, ultra-process foods.