Placing Food Items By The Checkouts Can Decrease Purchase

"The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, gang aft agley."

"A study has found that the location of fruit and chocolate items in a canteen can influence purchase of those items; but not in the direction that researchers predicted.

Katarzyna Chapman and Professor Jane Ogden of the University of Surrey are presenting the findings of their study today, Friday 11 September, at the British Psychological Society's Division of Health Psychology Annual Conference at Aston University.

The researchers changed the location of fruit and chocolate in the university canteen each week over three weeks so that either chocolate or fruit was positioned either close to the tills or to one side of the canteen.

Katarzyna Chapman said: 'We would have expected sales of products to have gone up when they were found by the checkout - as people may have purchased them on impulse. However, we actually found the opposite result.'"

Apparently, there is no "impulse" to buy that stuff.

Besides the fact that there are no healthy foods, only healthy eating, this research proves another crucial point.

The best one can hope to do is fool-proof a system.

It cannot be idiot-proofed since idiots are so ingenious and can defeat any system.

Arguably, in this case, fat idiots.