Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early days

Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by hyperpallium on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:40AM (#17263135)

> Wrigley started out as a soap salesman in his native Philadelphia. After moving to Chicago in 1891, he began offering store owners incentives to stock his products, such as free cans of baking powder with every order. When the baking powder proved a bigger hit than the soap, Wrigley sold that instead, and added in free packs of chewing gum as a promotion.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by amelius on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:39AM (#17263634)

Chewing gum reduces appetite. I take one before entering a supermarket, and it ensures I will not buy anything I don't need.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by Mashimo on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:47AM (#17264400)

I like shopping for food when I'm hungry. I will buy more food, which leads to less shopping in total.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by chipperyman573 on Friday June 08, 2018 @12:03PM (#17266749)

Ancidotal but whenever I shop hungry I buy a lot of junk food, and those costs really add up. I shop at Walmart though which is notorious for subconscious advertising so that might be a pretty big factor

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by emodendroket on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:23PM (#17269374)

The problem is you buy crap you aren't actually going to eat.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by shoo on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:51AM (#17263684)

my strategy is to only go shopping at supermarkets when i have recently eaten a decent meal, and i already have enough food back at home to survive with out needing to go grocery shopping for a few days. that way i only buy bargains, and reasonably often dont buy anything at all. it helps to live close to multiple supermarkets, and have too much spare time.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by mcherm on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:41AM (#17264706)

> my strategy is to only go shopping at supermarkets when [...] and i already have enough food back at home to survive with out needing to go grocery shopping for a few days.

Great strategy, but if you ever have interruptions that cause you to empty out the larder, you will then starve since you can't shop.

Oh, wait... you're probably a human being not a computer program. Sorry: it's a kind of a reflexive code review process for me by now.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by teddyh on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:58PM (#17268638)

“Oh no! I Waited too long! I’m slightly too hungry to leave the house!”

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/time-of-useful-conscious...

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by chiefalchemist on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:39AM (#17264352)

> "...and reasonably often dont buy anything at all..."

Yes. But time has a cost. The reality is, leaving empty handed is a loss.

As for bargains, that's the key. Buy big when X is priced low.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by dagw on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:44AM (#17264385)

Buy big when X is priced low.

Unless having lots of X at home will lead to you consuming more X at a faster rate than you normally would.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by Djvacto on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:06AM (#17264486)

What are you talking about? I would nev-

Where did all my pistachios go? I bought like 20 pounds.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by jschwartzi on Friday June 08, 2018 @10:03AM (#17265453)

And gained 40.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by chiefalchemist on Friday June 08, 2018 @03:40PM (#17269026)

I was thinking TP and such. But maybe having more TP makes me shit more? I'll have to set up a spreadsheet :)

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by dmarlow on Friday June 08, 2018 @10:28AM (#17265727)

That may apply to certain things, but I'm not going to use more napkins for the heck of it.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by apexalpha on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:41AM (#17263644)

You could just make a list and stick to it.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by majewsky on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:45AM (#17263658)

It's quite easy to influence your lizard brain's urges and impulses directly through a one-time action, and much harder to manually override them through continuous conscious interference.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by Retric on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:10AM (#17264508)

You can minimize the effort. I only go down isles that have what I need, so I can skip a lot of stuff without thinking about it. I avoid looking at the racks at checkout or areas that don't have what I need which again means I don't need to exercise self control.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by martin-adams on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:56AM (#17264806)

Don't forget supermarkets stacks the stuff you don't need but may buy on impulse at the end of isles, meaning you still have to pass them.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by fapjacks on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:55AM (#17263700)

This is where the ancient Stoics come in handy. I still struggle mightily with these kinds of things every single day, but we are animals, after all. It is certainly a lot easier for me than it was before I started studying stoicism, though.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by Dylan16807 on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:22AM (#17264278)

Some gum makes the right decisions a little easier.

A list removes the need to decide at all.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by laumars on Friday June 08, 2018 @05:21AM (#17263818)

I hate supermarkets so usually get in and out as quickly as I can. Often that means not getting some items on the list. I mean sure I've occasionally picked up stuff that hasn't been on the list but that's usually because it's something that should have been on the list but was forgotten about (eg milk or eggs - basics that get used frequently in a family home). However the times I walk out not buying stuff on the list far outweigh the times I've walked out with additional stuff that wasn't on the list. So I've never understood why people need such complicated systems to reduce supermarket spending like those described in this thread. But I guess everyone is different and perhaps some people like shopping and are prone to impulse buying?

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by dagw on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:59AM (#17264447)

I love food shopping and can easily spend an hour in my favorite food stores. Just roaming the isles, seeing what looks fresh/good/interesting that day and trying to come up with what I could use it for. I'll often head to the store to just get eggs and milk, leave with $80 of groceries and come home realizing I forgot the milk.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by qotgalaxy on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:58AM (#17264812)

You're just lucky that you have an archipelago for a supermarket.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by martin-adams on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:05AM (#17264851)

I see supermarkets as having 100 years of A/B testing to make sure that you don't stick to your list.

These include strategic floor layouts, the smell of fresh bakery goods such as bread and cakes, special offers, slow music, reduced lighting, fresh produce first, eggs in strange places, expensive products at eye level, and of course, the items in the checkout.

Having a shopping list does help. It's the sticking to it I'm curious to how easy that is.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by npongratz on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:16AM (#17264952)

I'm comfortable pitting my self-control against supermarkets' century of A/B testing.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by cglace on Friday June 08, 2018 @11:19AM (#17266275)

Their 100 years of A/B testing has no effect on my wife.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by majormajor on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:18PM (#17268272)

Alternately, they have years of testing how to present things to shoppers like me, where "stick to the list" is never a hard and fast rule, but there's a conscious desire to browse a bit too.

I wonder what the overall frequencies of different customer behaviors, there, are...

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by magic_beans on Friday June 08, 2018 @06:47AM (#17264160)

I don't understand... Even when I'm starving, that's not going to make me buy boxes of strange items at the grocery store... Now, if I was at a buffet, that's a different story.

Because most grocery store items are pre-packaged or raw, they don't even register in my mind as consumable food until I put the work in to cook them.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by jakobegger on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:26AM (#17264295)

I end up buying cookies when I'm hungry (I don't usually buy them)

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by winslow on Friday June 08, 2018 @03:21AM (#17263311)

This reminds me of 37Signal's [1] & ZachHolmans [2] talk about Your Product is your Byproduct. Real eye opener on how to think about what you're building and/or identify cross promotion etc.

[1] - https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products

[2] - https://zachholman.com/talk/product-is-the-byproduct/

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by nickjj on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:19AM (#17264568)

Reminds me of how McDonalds is really a real estate business.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by mywittyname on Friday June 08, 2018 @01:06PM (#17267467)

This realization is how Ray Kroc came to own McDonalds instead of the original founders, Richard and Maurice McDonald.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by PhasmaFelis on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:32AM (#17263610)

And then, I guess, he switched up to selling the gum...

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by StavrosK on Friday June 08, 2018 @05:24AM (#17263832)

Yep, that was the implication.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by mseebach on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:39AM (#17264356)

It could be fun PR stunt for an anniversary or whatever if they started to hand out bars of soap with sticks of gum...

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by CalRobert on Friday June 08, 2018 @03:40AM (#17263404)

Maybe your grandfather had a bigger effect on cultural memory than realized. I still can't seem to leave Ikea without getting an ice cream...

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by netsharc on Friday June 08, 2018 @03:58AM (#17263480)

Mr. IKEA (can't be bothered to google his name) realized that some of his store visitors left without buying anything because they were hungry, so he opened restaurants in the stores.

(Imprecise anecdote, it could've been their customer research team and not the owner...)

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by colde on Friday June 08, 2018 @05:12AM (#17263772)

His name was Ingvar Kamprad (the letters IK in IKEA is from his name).

The E and A comes from Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, respectively the farm where he grow up, and his home town.

And it was indeed Ingvar that was the brains behind it back in 1956, i am not really sure they had "customer research teams" back then.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by jules on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:44AM (#17263652)

I imagine it also helps with family shoppers. If the kids or one spouse is tired or bored they can go to the restaurant. Ikea's restaurant is so cheap that some people go there just for that. I think they buy their furniture and household products at ikea.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by TeMPOraL on Friday June 08, 2018 @05:16AM (#17263787)

I never leave IKEA without stopping for their hot dogs. Were I living close to it, I'd go for those hot dogs frequently.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by teh_klev on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:06AM (#17264225)

For me it's their bags of meatballs but I'd also have a hotdog just for the road home :)

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by cjrp on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:34AM (#17264324)

Our local IKEA actually has a free crèche too, so the kids don't get bored either.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by magoon on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:00AM (#17264206)

I have contemplated large purchases while in IKEA’s caf. I’ve even gone back to measure or check on different configurations. If they didn’t have them, I would have left already to eat, and possibly decided against following through on the order.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by loosetypes on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:47AM (#17264398)

And their food prices are deliberately underpriced so you'll generalize the perceived savings onto their furniture.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by laumars on Friday June 08, 2018 @05:24AM (#17263830)

It's worked on me. I hate shopping and sometimes the only reason my wife gets me to IKEA is with the promise of a pre-shopping meal + beer at their restaurant.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by mygo on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:08PM (#17270461)

this is also why I like going to Costco.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by Zhenya on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:24AM (#17263061)

The other stores should have given out coolers...

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by tener on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:34AM (#17263103)

And nobody gamed it by visiting the competitors first...?

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by PhasmaFelis on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:34AM (#17263616)

First-time customers probably don't know about it, and even repeat customers may not remember. It's not really a "checkmate" move, just a little bit of strategy.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by Freak_NL on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:41AM (#17263645)

The percentage of people who actively try to game these situations is probably negligible.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by gitgud on Friday June 08, 2018 @01:36AM (#17262860)

A genius idea, did it work for him?

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by bitsoda on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:26AM (#17265033)

I’d say so! Our family just celebrated 50 years in business.

https://www.eldoradofurniture.com

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by creaghpatr on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:02AM (#17264832)

Wow that is absolutely genius, call that an analog growth hack.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by pingou on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:24AM (#17263059)

Are you sure it was so they didn't go to the competitor? What was the point? They already left his store, surely not being able to go to the competitor the same day won't change anything? They probably appreciated the gesture though.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by tempestn on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:42AM (#17263144)

It's fairly common with furniture shopping to visit a bunch of stores on the same day. Even if his isn't the first store visited, if he prevents customers from visiting other stores, he probably boosts sales by at least some amount. More than the cost of the ice cream I would guess. Plus, good will!

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by dawnerd on Friday June 08, 2018 @03:52AM (#17263458)

Similar to why car dealerships put up bounce castles and do free bqq. Kids will ask parents to go, parents see free food. Even if they don't make a sale it leaves a good impression.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by toomanybeersies on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:14AM (#17263541)

In Australia and New Zealand, hardware stores let schools and other groups do bbqs for fundraisers outside their stores.

It works exactly the same way. There have been several times that I have gone to Bunnings for a hangover snag, and ended up buying something.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by Nursie on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:31AM (#17263606)

Conversely there were a whole bunch of times I went to Bunnings a bit hungover but needing some home supplies, and found the sausage-sizzle a blessed addition :)

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by welly on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:48AM (#17263670)

A visit to Bunnings isn't a visit to Bunnings without a snag in white bread (with onions).

Sadly, Bunnings effort to open up in the UK has fallen flat on its face and so I won't get to enjoy the Saturday morning Bunnings snag unless I go back to Australia.

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by Nursie on Friday June 08, 2018 @05:08AM (#17263762)

> Sadly, Bunnings effort to open up in the UK has fallen flat on its face and so I won't get to enjoy the Saturday morning Bunnings snag unless I go back to Australia.

I was just about to say the same! I only lived in Aus for a few years and came back to the UK; the news that we were getting Bunnings made me happy but it's all gone South now. I was really looking forward to those charity snags!

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by bluedino on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:48AM (#17264746)

It's amazing how free hotdogs and snacks will 'guilt' people into buying a $40,000 car

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Re:Home Depot stocked shelves with empty boxes in its early ... by konschubert on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:40AM (#17263136)

I guess that furniture isn't always bought on the first visit?

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