A supermarket is a place where you can buy products, and therefore, a lot of these products are stored in the supermarket. Hence the name “warehouse”. The customer is supposed to go through the shelves of the supermarket and pick his or her preferred products.
The goal of a supermarkt should thus be: make it easy for the customer to find the products. Efforts are made in making the space between shelves large enough to pass with the carts, large arrows show where products can be found and somehow, it is clear that somebody did some brainstorming about where to place the products.
The efforts of this person for my local supermarket have been completely useless for me. My logic and reasoning is in no way compatible with the thinking of the supermarket designer. Here some examples of how I would design the supermarket:
- Coffee cream: coffee cream is actually a kind of milk, so go to the milk department for coffee cream, please.
- Canned tomatoes: they are vegetables in a tin, so look in the “canned vegetables” department
- Vinegar: vinegar is actually made of wine, so the vinegar can be found in the neighborhood of the wine department
- Potatoes: potatoes are full of starch, and pasta and rice as well. Potatoes are therefore close to pasta and rice.
- …
However, my local supermarkt designer had other ideas:
- Coffee cream: you drink this cream with your coffee, so the coffee cream is next to the coffee.
- Canned tomatoes: these are usually used in combination with pasta to make a pasta sauce. You can find the tomatoes next to the pasta’s.
- Vinegar: it looks a lot like olive oil, so let’s put it there.
- Potatoes: they are round, and so are apple, so let’s put them there?
- ???
I spent a complete hour in the supermarkt this morning. The pragmatic structure of my local supermarkt drives me crazy.
