How shops trick you into spending more?

It turns out that retailers have many tricks up their sleeves to make you part with your hard-earned cash. When you step into a shop and you smell bread baking or hear the background music, make no mistake about it, this is hardly a courtesy. What's going on is a shrewd attempt at making you more prone to impulse buying.

These days, all the big shops have teams of professionals working out how to trick you. They're experts at psychological manipulation. They know we're only human and it's easy for us to fall for these clever techniques. It might be the oversized shopping trollies to entice you to make larger purchases or putting essential items at the back of the store which increases the odds of buying more stuff along the way. Nothing is left to chance. It's all been carefully thought out.

Some people claim they can beat the supermarkets at their own game. While this might certainly be the case for a small number of savvy shoppers, the vast majority of customers can often be taken for a ride even when they think they're getting a discount. Apparently, there's more to it than meets the eye when spotting a bargain. And even if there are some genuine discounts on offer, they are simply baited to get you inside the store where who knows what rash decisions you might make about other products on display.

Most of us have fallen victim to something as simple as placing more expensive products at eye level. We just grab what we want, not realizing that the items on the bottom shelf better value for money. Even kids might have their stuff presented at eye level and they will be the ones talking you into buying something for them.

Retailers are all the time flogging bigger packs, marking down such items and making them look more attractive, as they know we all love getting a deal. Purchasing bigger quantities instead of smaller packs definitely sounds like a good idea to save money. So why not go for it? Well, you may end up drinking or eating more of it as there's plenty so they've won again.

Worse still, you might pop into your local supermarket just to pick up a few things and fall prey to that attractive offer staring you in the face. They've just slapped the word bargain or sale in bright red or yellow letters on it and you automatically assume it's cheaper when, in actual fact, it might work out at the same price or be more expensive. You then walk out with what looked like a great offer, only to find out a few months later that you just used a bit and it went off.