Rory Sutherland's Blog

Rory Sutherland

To aficionados of the shopping trolley, this type is apparently known as "the Japanese style" presumably because it originated in Japan. I suppose I should ring someone at WPP to check - even though technically Wire and Plastic Products only makes baskets, not trolleys.

The Japanese model can be distinguished from the vast full-depth trolley model popular with survivalists and Catholic families in that the deck is much higher up and there is a large area of wasted space beneath. Its capacity is perhaps a third that of a large trolley, but several times that of a basket.

Now to a purely rational man this kind of trolley serves little purpose. What is the point of something which takes up just as much floor-space as a larger trolley but which only offers a fraction of the load-carrying capacity?

I think the answer lies in an couple of anomalies of human behaviour.

For one thing, people entering supermarkets are probably prone to underestimate how much they will buy, or at least enter the store intending to buy very little, but end up tempted to buy more. When confronted with the choice of a basket and an insanely large trolley, many people may end up picking a basket only to find themselves overburdened with heavy shopping half-way round the store, hence buying much less than they might have done with a smaller trolley. The medium-sized trolley seems less disproportionate to moderate shoppers as they enter the store, and hence may discourage the use of baskets.

But the main reason is, I suspect, to do with what behaviourists call choice anchoring - the idea that the choices we make are often illogically distorted by the range on offer. One example of this is the following conversation supposedly overheard in an American restaurant.

"What entrees do you have?"

"We have fish or chicken."

"I'll have the fish"

"Oh, sir, and I forgot: we also have beef."

"In which case I'll have the chicken."

The point here is that, even though the beef was never an option, its presence on the menu served to make the chicken seem a relatively healthier option.

The medium-sized trolleys hence probably work in tandem with the large trolleys to implicitly discourage the use of baskets. (It would be wonderful to try a few experiments here - perhaps with outsized baskets.)

But my question here is really that at the top of my article. Who came up with this discovery? Behavioural insights such as this might well have been worth a few hundred million pounds to any retailer over the last ten years, and yet I have never heard of anyone much being briefed or paid to look for them.  

We spend almost all out time attempting to change behaviour through overt persuasion - while paying no attention to influencing the other, barely conscious ways in which people behave.

In the same way, far too little time is spent understanding and improving customer experience. Seventy-five percent of the US economy is now in services, and yet the focus of advertising has changed little from the time when it was used mostly to sell products.

One hope of mine is that a recession may bring new focus on these things - not least because they are sometimes fantastically cheap. You may find a few welcome suggestions here at www.customerfutures.com/downeconomypublication .