---

If you want to talk about one place where they have developed marketing into an almost perfect science it is the grocery store. Researchers have studied the food isles and designed them for the optimum shopping experience. In other words, they have designed a rat maze stocked with products that will fleece you of every available spending dollar in your pocket as you walk through the store to buy a gallon of milk.

 

Ever wonder why they put the milk all the way in the back of the store? It’s because they know that it’s an item that were constantly purchasing and we are conditioned to walk through the rat maze of isles they have designed with little coupon dispensers spitting out coupons and beeping at you as you walk past, to buy something else on your way to the back of the store to get a gallon of milk. It’s pure genius. And it works!

 

The design and layout of grocery stores is to maximize profit. Same goes for the shopping malls, department stores and anywhere else humans go. The only place you do not find this is in your own insanely disorganized home, where you are probably running out of room to store all the things that you have needlessly purchased and out in the middle of the arctic wilderness where the cost of a half eaten salmon left behind by a polar bear is free. 

 

What it all comes down to is that you are going to have to make choices about what you are going to do with your money. Should you choose to be manipulated, then you will be manipulated. Should you choose to challenge the status quo, then you have a big fight on your hands, for your foe is formidable. Corporate America will not give up that easily. But at least, you will be able to hold your head up and know that you did not give up without a fight.