I cried when they closed the old Walmart for a super center when I was a child. This isn’t an age thing it’s a comfort from familiarity thing.

I think Aldi is so successful in the US because they don’t do this. There is an aisle or two with random crap, and seasonal items in another spot, but I can be in and out with everything I went for in ten minutes. Trader Joe’s might do this too, I haven’t been to one in a long time. I wonder if Whole Foods or the other upscale stores fuck around with their shoppers like that.

Smaller grocery chains or independent grocers didnt change their store layouts from what I remember, but they went under or were bought out by the big chains that are already very profitable but still try to wring everything they can out of their captive audience.

Studies show more time spent in the store equates to more sales. They have to measure time in store and extra sales against time to reorganize. As regular time moves forward it becomes increasingly worth more to rearrange until it outweighs the time to reorganize by a certain margin.

They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.