How Whole Foods "Primes" You to Shop | Hacker News Reader

How Whole Foods "Primes" You to Shop

fastcompany.com

70 pointstimf42 comments

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.

I've eaten at so many restaurants that have written signs in chalk and left them the same for months that I assume those signs are months old. I've never been in a WF or Trader Joe's (which has the same practice) and thought "huhn, good price today"; rather I think "ah, they're on sale this week."

Ever notice that there's ice everywhere in this store? Why? Does hummus really need to be kept so cold? What about cucumber-and-yogurt dip? No and no.

What?? YES and YES... hummus is BEANS and beans go bad quickly even when cold. And yogurt is dairy that's already started to go bad.

Similarly, for years now supermarkets have been sprinkling select vegetables with regular drops of water--a trend that began in Denmark. Why?

Because leafy greens DRY OUT in drafty or warm environments. Yes water makes them rot, but the alternative is dry, wilted spinach.

Believe it or not, my research found that while it may look fresh, the average apple you see in the supermarket is actually 14 months old.

Yes, apples are kept in environmentally-controlled chambers so they can be sold all year. Of course if you buy an apple in March it's not fresh. What does this have to do with priming?

There's an episode of Modern Marvels which shows the "banana room" at a national distribution center for a grocery chain. They have a gigantic environmentally controlled room where they can delay how quickly a banana becomes ripe. It's the classic "big bucket being filled by a hose at rate X and being drained at rate Y" highschool physics problem, implemented using bananas :)

It's shameful to find this kind of pseudo-science on the front page of HN. Most of the article details plain old communication at work, but the author chose to paint it under dark intentions.

If a salesman chooses to put on a suit, cologne and an expensive watch, he's being professional about his job. He wants to communicate value. According to the author, this salesman would wear luxury objects to make me feel inferior and that I might attain his social status by buying his products.

That's not an argument against it, though. You're claiming cause-effect on luxury and professional / communicating value, but that's not something you can really prove because it's bound up in the historical significance of that kind of professionalism.

If anything (and potentially toned-down for realism), the author is probably claiming that people do that because it works, and they're offering a different reason for why it does than you are.

What exactly in hell is "professional" about putting on a suit, cologne, and an expensive watch?

Actually, we're all fed up with the endless shameful communication of the appearance of "value", and would prefer some actual substance for a change.

A question for you all:

I've seen the Derren Brown video[1] mentioned at the beginning of this article. But I'm wondering whether it is "real". For example, there must be a cameraman in the car on the trip, and he deliberately films the supposed subliminal cues. Are we expected to believe that the people in the car did not notice this? And there are other carefully positioned cameramen on the route the car takes. Etc. I think it likely that the video is a setup -- or at least a very poorly designed experiment.

I realize that this article is really about Whole Foods and their marketing strategy. Still, the article spends three paragraphs talking about Brown's "trick", implying that it is solid evidence of an surprising and significant phenomenon.

And now the question: What you do think? Also, does anyone have more concrete evidence on trustworthiness of the Brown video?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg

Unfortunately, I can't offer anything specific to that video.

But I can say that many of Derren's tricks are combinations of forces, multiple tries (how many ad execs participated?), compliant participants, and my favorite "dual realities". Dual realities are when a magician's words have different meanings, depending on how people have been prepped. And with video, you don't know what sort of direct priming he cut out.

In general, I've come to believe that the explanations he offers are NEVER the real mechanism for the trick. The pseudo-explanation. The wonderment that the given explanation might possibly work just adds to the trick.

I didn't see any shots where the cameraman suspiciously dwelled on the cues during the ride. They were mostly caught in passing during pans, or in the background when the camera was ostensibly filming the ad guys on the ride.

I don't see why you think the cameramen along the route would arouse suspicion. This wasn't an undercover operation where the ad guys didn't know up front they were being filmed for a TV segment. The only secret part would be that they were the subject of the experiment rather than part of the set up for an experiment on some other subject.

Assuming the episode was completely real, I'd argue that he set up a creative problem that had only one posible solution. Ask any creative professional how he would make taxidermy tasteful for the general public and he will likely have to recur to heaven, as death has no other upside. Heaven, being an abstract concept, only has a couple of physical references: gates, angels, clouds. And if an eight foot bear is subliminal priming, I'll be damned.

I think it's a fake.

The whole priming process was based on the assumption that creative execs will stare out taxi window during the ride. And that is a very large assumption. I basically do not know anyone who would do that unless they are lost in their thoughts in which case they won't even focus, optically, on anything outside of the car.

So, yeah, fake I would say. Nice idea though.

From what I've seen and read about Derren Brown, I think he likes this kind of skepticism about what he does. That was basically the whole premise of the "win the lottery" video, for example... to show how easy it is for people to be bamboozled.

Quite likely a setup and not some psychological effect. He's relied on similar tricks in the past, such as using video effects to "predict" the lottery [1] and a fake casino set under the pretense of calculating the trajectory of a roulette ball [2].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG-5qebwflA See drdirs's comment. [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVThCpMPON0 See mazotu's comment.

I believe this is the actual video mentioned in the article. It's the American version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f29kF1vZ62o

This article does not demonstrate priming, just marketing. Priming would imply that what I saw in the front makes me shop in the back. But all the examples listed are to make me buy the item being displayed, not a different item.

Deleted comment

Yes, I read it. And flowers is hardly priming. They sell a lot more than produce in the store.

And in any case all groceries sell flowers, this article makes it seem like Whole Foods has some extra thing they do.

And as for apples? Believe it or not, my research found that while it may look fresh, the average apple you see in the supermarket is actually 14 months old.

I'd believe 4 months. Maybe 8. But 14 as the average? That would mean apples more than 14 months old just as likely as those less than 14 months old. Something about this statistic seems off.

Apples do store very well, a big reason why they're historically popular.

But I suspect you're right to be suspicious of the word average here; they probably meant to say up to.

More evidence: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/supermarket-apples-10-mo...

In North America there seem to be two seasons for apples: autumn in North America, and autumn in South America. In September and October you get the fresh NA apples. In March and April you get the fresh SA apples. There is no reason to have an apple older than 6 months.

I've gotta wonder if he meant 1.4 months. In this economy, nobody would keep 14 months of product in inventory and hope that there's a buyer for it down the road.

The bananas I buy here in the US are flown in from South America in under 48 hours. I can get tulips from Holland in less than that. The apples number makes no sense.

You are quite literally comparing apples to bananas.

Bananas don't keep. Apples can be kept in the proper environment for a year.

Bananas grow year-round in the tropical climates whence they are sourced. Most apples are sourced locally and only grow in late summer/early fall.

If I want to buy an apple in June, the only way to do it is to buy one that's several months old.

So noone would buy up a lot of the stock of a particular product to artificially inflate prices?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10682433

I was of course addressing the parents universal claim that noone buys perishables to stock pile.

FWIW the article refers to Anthony Ward, a dealer in cocoa, who purchased 15% of the worlds supply during a shortage and managed to inflate global prices (depending who you talk to, http://www.tradingvisions.org/content/choc-finger-offloads-h...) enough to sell on a large profit despite considerable wastage.

He's done it before too.

Nobody would ever do that.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2011/07/goldmans-sec...

But hoarding a perpetually renewable, perishable product? Doesn't seem likely.

Of course apples are kept for long times. 14 months seems iffy, but in order to sell apples all year round, you have to store them for many months. Most produce is sold this way, but apples are particularly good for storage. You can store apples in cardboard in a cool dry room of your own house for months.

Most produce is not sold this way. It is staggered by hemisphere to take advantage of the seasons. You'll get North American apples in the fall and south american apples during the spring. You may be able to store apples for a few weeks and possible a few months for heartier lines. But every minute it's not sold is money being lost in storage or wastage.

That's not how averages work. If you have four apples that are 1 month old each, and one apple that is 66 months old, the average age is 14 months, but a randomly chosen apple is 4 times more likely to be less than 14 months old than to be older.

That's exactly how averages work if you're using the median value rather than the arithmetic mean. If the median age for an apple is 14 months, then you have the same chance of selecting an apple that is either older or younger than 14 months.

"average" is generally taken to mean "arithmetic mean" when its meaning is not otherwise specified.

I agree - more than 1 year makes no sense whatsoever. They grow each year, why would someone pay to stick them in a fridge for an entire year? It's not like the crop is that variable that it's necessary to stockpile them.

Someone pays money for such primitive writings? May be I can get some part-time job? ^_^

One who wants to learn how to sell fruits or vegetables should visit some big Asian bazar (local word for a marketplace) and take a look. Most of sellers are gurus of merchandising, which in this context means how to place fruits, which ones to put together, which ones to put aside, which ones in customer's reach, which one only to display, aren't some kind of WF innovations, but quite old ideas. And instead of flowers they put fresh tiny branches with leafs, as if they were accidentally cut in harvesting. And of course, the ideas about showing boxes, as if it was just fresh delivery, or putting drops of water on fruits, or making a fresh cuts, giving you some fruit to touch or to smell, and so on. The best markets I have seen was inside and around Kashmir valley, and, of course, street vendors in Nepal's capital Kathmandu. So, this article is something like, I don't know, an amateur take to the subject. ^_^

And all that Whole Foods thing is just for people who know no better. Fresh means when it comes morning time directly from a tree or from a field by people who brought stuff to sellers.))

This article could really do with some photographs. I don't think the local Whole Foods by us does some of these things.

Why was the only image in this article a picture of a female track race? Unless his book is published by Nike, I think the author/FastCompany missed the boat on priming us with an actually relevant symbolic!

Why, you intuitively know that it is an article written by winners for winners. So if you want to win, buy the book.

They just described every large grocery store I've been to in the past few years. Hardly Whole Foods specific, and highly debatable anyway - I prefer all the ice, because normally that hummus or yogurt is a good deal warmer when I buy it than when it comes out of my fridge. And it'll likely sit there for quite a while before I come to buy it. And it has to survive the trip home. I prefer as much buffer-zone as I can get.

Ironically, though I've heard it referred to as "whole paycheck", many of the things I've been buying elsewhere I've found cheaper at Whole Foods - good kefir, for instance. Elsewhere things like that are oddball luxury items that they mark up considerably more while they have them, and get rid of when they don't sell as well. That is why I keep going back.

Penn and Teller aren't fooled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfGybFz6GRY

All the "suggestion" stuff is called out around 7:30, but you may as well watch the whole clip to see what's being discussed.

Am I the only one really skeptical about that Derren Brown video? I think the real deal with that video is that it is just completely made up entertainment for the viewers, not an actual documentary of something that happened. That, or there is something not shown in it.

It seems rather unlikely to me that a few cues placed would make someone's behavior that predictable. What about the lifetime of other cues they have to draw from, or even just simple random whims that can influence the outcome?

I think it's pretty clear that either the video is staged, or they had to try tons of times to get some marketers to produce those results. Derren Brown generally admits that he uses sleight of hand to fake astonishing results, so even that is a possibility with this video.

I can't cite an example but I'm pretty sure he claims that he never "fakes" anything. But saying that he does use regular magic mixed with mentalism to great effect.

Every successful store does this. And most successful websites too. Groceries are a low margin business so any price raising idea gets copied over and over. Retailers and consumer products computers are leaders in data mining to test, measure and retest techniques.

That said... The Columbus Circle Whole Foods is awesone. Pricey but awesome compared to other local options.

Derren Brown has consistently been vocal than Neurolingistic Programming does not work and every act he performs that seemingly involving NLP is actually done via sleight of hand.

Do you have a citation to that effect. This seems contrary to what I've seen of his shows (I was quite a fan in the past but haven't seen anything recently).

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