The Sneaky Reason Grocery Stores Rearrange Their Layouts — And How It Could Be Costing You

Do you ever go looking for the chocolate animal crackers you buy every week to eat while you’re watching “Survivor,” but once you reach the grocery store shelf where you’ve always found them, they aren’t there? In fact, the entire aisle is no longer filled with cookies and crackers — it’s now pasta and tomato sauce and canned veggies?

OK — maybe you’ve never encountered that exact scenario, but odds are if you’ve shopped at the same grocery store for several years, you’ve probably faced a store layout reorganization at some point.

Why do stores do this? Isn’t making shoppers hunt for items bad for business?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Kristen Aiken, HuffPost’s Editorial Director of Life and Commerce.

“My sister-in-law’s brother and his family have owned a grocery store in Brooklyn for 32 years, and I talked to him to get some intel on this,” Aiken told us. “He said it’s something that they do to try to force you to walk around and discover new products, because people like me — I’m so used to my routine that I’m never gonna discover anything new. I’m only going to buy what’s on my list.”

Sending shoppers down aisles they might normally never visit can be great for a store’s profits.

“I read that — this blew my mind — the average grocery store’s profit margin is only 2%,” Michelson said. “They need people to buy more groceries than they normally do, and one way is forcing you to go down aisles looking for the things you normally buy because you can’t find them because they reset everything. And then you’re like, ‘Oh, those cookies actually look good! Maybe I’ll get those too.’ The more random stuff we buy spontaneously, the higher their