How To Really Understand Gruen Effect

This knowledge will help you save money when shopping!

Photo of a shopping mall on the left (credit: Magda Ehlers), and illustration of a floor plan on the right (illustration by the author) — Image edited by the author

Gruen effect (also known as Gruen transfer) is a psychophysics concept that subtly underlies your supermarket and shopping mall experiences. When was the last time that you visited your nearby supermarket to pick up toilet paper and ended up buying a whole list of items that you did NOT plan to buy? If that sounds familiar and worrying, here is something more to add to your worry: you actually forgot the toilet paper!

“Oh come on! That smoothie-maker was on offer! Besides, I could use more chips and cookies back home. I’ll just get the toilet paper tomorrow.”

This is the kind of typical rhetoric we tell ourselves after we mess up like this. But wait! Did you really believe that you messed up? Well okay, I am not here to liberate you from that feeling entirely; if you fail your purchase-plan, it is indeed your responsibility.

However, all I am saying is that the odds were stacked against you right from the get-go! Your friendly neighbourhood supermarket uses the Gruen effect to trick/manipulate you into making impulse purchases.

In this essay, I start by covering the historical origin of the Gruen effect. Following this, I dive into the various applications of this concept in contemporary…