A post over on another thread got me wondering about this. I am about to go off on a holiday so probably won't get to read the responses before it drops of the bottom, but I will look it up then.

For years people have been telling me about how supermarkets are cunningly designed so you are led past specific places in the aisles, how the air is scented, cunningly planned lighting and strategic impulse buys and all the rest.

Very little of that applies to online sales. True, they can position one or two adverts, but if you work from a saved list few of those classical tricks are available. You might see one or two offers in the adverts, but that is a tiny percentage of the hundreds the big supermarkets throw at you if you visit a shop.

Then self checkout. I don't use then very often, but I don't remember the vast galleries of sweets etc next to them that there are on the normal checkouts. The physics is all wrong: there is a 'channel' you have to walk down with a normal checkout with goods to the left of you, goods to the right of you (while all the world wondered). With self checkouts, those channels don't exist.

Now, I hardly feel sorry for the trials and hardships of supermarkets, but I hadn't really appreciated how so many of their tricks of the trade are simply no longer there. No doubt they are desperately trying to replace them, but what are they doing that with? Especially, as I say, if you are working from a 'saved list'?