Attention sheeple … er, shoppers! You may not know it, but if you’ve ever entered a Whole Foods Market, you’ve actually been “primed” to shop.
Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, wrote an interesting article at FastCompany about how the popular market subtly persuades its shoppers to buy things.
Take, for instance, the stylish “chalk” drawn signs:
The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate–a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It’s as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory.
[...] How Whole Foods Market “Primes” Customers to Shop [...]