ONE wonders if the gentle reader has come across the most apt definition of the ‘supermarket’.

A supermarket, this definition goes, is the place you go to when you need to buy a tube of toothpaste; when you emerge out of it, after two grueling hours and a few hundred rupees worth of shopping, it suddenly dawns on you that you forgot to pick up the toothpaste you had initially gone in for!

That is what can be called the ‘supermarket syndrome’.

The aforementioned lays out the philosophy behind the idea of setting up supermarkets.

The person who first thought of it must have been a first rate psychologist and a sales expert rolled into one.

By all accounts, he or she must have been a genius.

The theory behind the idea is simple enough.

The more a person is offered a tasteful display of products, the greater the temptation of buying them.

The mere fact that the person in question has no need for a certain product has nothing to do with it.

The good old laws of demand and supply have thereby all gone awry in the wonder-ful world of supermarkets.

Coming back to the supermarket philosophy, the only possible inhibiting factor on an individual’s outrageous pur-chase spree in the supermarket could have been the contents of his or her wallet/purse.

This was once a powerful dis-incentive.

But........

© Pakistan Observer