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> One of the local grocery stores here will play a bunch of 80s hits. They play Eye of the Tiger regularly. That song is one of the most purpose driven songs ever. If you had a mission to pick up 7 items in your list you can be sure you'll be done in record time.

As somebody who likes to finish their grocery shopping quickly, I picture myself in a video montage with that song as the soundtrack.

Sidenote: I felt old when I heard Gangsta's Paradise being played in a grocery store about 10 years ago.

Been spending most our lives

walking up and down in aisle 5

> I felt old when I heard Gangsta's Paradise being played in a grocery store about 10 years ago.

What store was it?

A Metro (or maybe it was still A&P) in London, Ontario.

It won't be long until Nine Inch Nails starts playing at nursing homes.

I want to bingo like an animal

A bit apt. Toenails can be hard to get at when you're old.

Having worked in one in the past, I have been thinking about this a lot. The one that i was at, just before COVID, had a single computer for all the residents which was a little bizarre.

The rest of environment and recreation programs will have to adapt.

Aging millennials will probably demand things like game consoles, coffee drinks, meals like sushi and actual exercise equipment.

Current nursing home setup are so incompatible with incoming generations, it will be a flurry of activity to adapt.

I'd be surprised if I heard Lost in the Supermarket by The Clash.

What you're quoting is their literature review, not their study. Their study was:

>... conducted in a medium-size store operated by a large, nationally known chain of supermarkets ... The study covered a nine-week period starting on January 28 and ending on March 31, 1980...

... M0=no music, M1=slow, M2=fast music...

...they measured (1) traffic speed (2) daily gross sales (3)...

...for (1) they found: traffic flow was significantly slower with the slow tempo music (Ml mean = 127.53 seconds) than for the faster tempo music (M2 mean = 108.93 seconds) ... Ml stimulated an even slower pace than no music (a mean of 127.53 seconds for Ml compared to a mean of 119.86 for Mo), although not statistically significant...

...for (2) they found: The higher sales volumes were consistently associated with the slower tempo musical selections while in contrast, the lower sales figures were consistently associated with the faster tempo music (MI mean = $16,740.23 compared with M2 mean = $12,112.85). This difference is significant...

I don't have Jstor access so can't read the study, but does this consider the intended demographic of the supermarkets?

Just some thoughts off the top of my head:

I would imagine that clients with a higher median age in general prefer slower music.

I would also imagine that clients with a higher median age in general are more affluent (or more likely to be shopping for more than one person).

As a result, I would expect spend to be higher in areas with an older customer base.

Managers with an older customer base would likely select music that appeals to their customer base, likely slower music. Shoppers who do not like the manager's music taste may opt to instead shop somewhere where the music is more in line with their own tastes, so I'm not sure that the independent variable here can be properly controlled.

Therefore, the study may actually be finding a correlation which depends rather on the affluence of the community, rather than what they purport to have discovered.

From the study:

> It became imperative to develop an operational definition for the music variables slow tempo and fast tempo; that is, how slow is slow and how fast is fast? To answer this a sample was selected at random from the trading area of the supermarket. Subjects were chosen to reflect the age, sex and other relevant socioeconomic characteristics of the store's customers. Each subject was asked to listen to several instrumental musical arrangements and to classify them as slow, fast or somewhere in between. A total of 95% of the subjects classified musical selections with a tempo of 72 beats per minute or fewer as slow. Selections with a tempo of 94 beats per minute or more were classified as fast. Thus, the range from 73 to 94 beats per minute was considered between fast and slow, although this category was not directly a part of this study. Therefore, based on these findings, slow tempo music was defined as having a tempo of 72 beats per minute or fewer, an average of 60 and a standard deviation of 6. Fast tempo music was defined as having 94 beats per minute or more, an average of 108 and a standard deviation of 7.

> However, perceptions of slow and fast may vary across geographic regions or demographic parameters and therefore, the reader must be cautioned against generalizing these findings too far beyond the scope of this study.

According to at least one store manager interviewed in Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, the employees at the store are responsible for selecting music because they're the ones who have to listen to it all day. There isn't a lot of deeper thought going into it.

it's not quite that simple, because stores play music they have licensed. And of course during the holiday season the employees are subject to a lot of songs they most likely never want to hear again, like the prolific Mariah Carey and Wham songs.

Yeah this depends a lot on the store.

I know trader Joe's employees can pick the music, but they have a reputation as being employee friendly. When I worked at a low end grocery store we had no say at all and just got whatever they sent to us.

We did however sometimes hijack the PA system after hours and play whatever we wanted over that.

that depends entirely on which store you're talking about. the store i used to work at, for example, would simply put the radio on, while a store next door was run like this

> the store i used to work at, for example, would simply put the radio on

Who selected the station?

the owners

N=1, I've definitely tried to work in coffee shops during the christmas period that played the same obnoxious christmas songs on a loop to drive the customers out.

> One of the local grocery stores here will play a bunch of 80s hits.

I remember once where the local mall played Foule sentimentale by Alain Souchon, which has very anti consumerist lyrics... Made that grocery shopping trip quite ironic.

I remember someone telling me this about McDonalds when I was a teenager. I went to a store and listened carefully, it was just local radio. Sounds like a myth.

Radio is basically illegal to play in public due to licensing, so most chains would not want the liability. Not saying it doesn’t happen, just that that franchisee was playing chicken with a copyright infringement lawsuit.

It definitely falls into the category of “things I don’t believe work” or “things I don’t think work on me.”

I’m not going to a mall to be hypnotized into sleepwalking my way from purchasing opportunity to purchasing opportunity - I’m there to get in, get the stuff I came for, and get out. No matter if they’re playing fast music, loud music, holiday music, kids music - I’m not there to listen to the music. It has no bearing on the choices I make or the actions I take.

Very very hard for me to believe this stuff, it seems far too much like pseudoscientific magic to me.