Yes, they've been placing food/beverages at the back since years ago.
This also means that customers that are in a hurry to buy bread/food/milk/whatever are more likely to go to their local grocery store. As we, the customers, may be stupid enough to buy into their .99 tricks, but we aren't so stupid as to not notice that it took 3 hours to buy milk or bread, as many times you're really not in the mood to gape at useless shit. It's interesting though that local grocery stores are not so common in the U.S., compared to Europe. To get food, I only need to cross the street.
Also, setting the prices dynamically will not work in an online world. What if customers had a mobile app with which they could compare prices with other retailers just by scanning the bar code? Again, customers aren't so stupid - they may not notice that the price of individual items has gone up, but they do notice fluctuations in their monthly spending.
I can testify that the milk trick does work, at least with my own family. They say they will promise to only spend a minute getting milk and end up buying a bunch of other groceries as well.
Dynamic price setting works because people are not perfect rational actors that compare every single item they look at to the lowest price in town. I don't know if anyone does that actually.
People might notice a bigger shopping bill, but they are more likely to attribute it to buying more than slightly higher prices on every single item, which they might not even notice.
In any case they wouldn't be doing this if it didn't make them more money.
Yes, they've been placing food/beverages at the back since years ago.
This also means that customers that are in a hurry to buy bread/food/milk/whatever are more likely to go to their local grocery store. As we, the customers, may be stupid enough to buy into their .99 tricks, but we aren't so stupid as to not notice that it took 3 hours to buy milk or bread, as many times you're really not in the mood to gape at useless shit. It's interesting though that local grocery stores are not so common in the U.S., compared to Europe. To get food, I only need to cross the street.
Also, setting the prices dynamically will not work in an online world. What if customers had a mobile app with which they could compare prices with other retailers just by scanning the bar code? Again, customers aren't so stupid - they may not notice that the price of individual items has gone up, but they do notice fluctuations in their monthly spending.