There's a practical reason for this. Temperature and where they unload (and the perishable nature). Not saying there couldn't be a manipulative reason too, but I wouldn't assume so by default.

Everything in business happens to increase sales. For retail, there’s even a name and occupation for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planogram

You always want dairy and fruits/vegetables on opposite sides of the store since they’re perishable, hence they get purchased the most often, and you want people to walk past all the other aisles every time.

It seems to me that a sensible person buying a lot of groceries gets refrigerated and frozen items last so they have the least amount of melting/warming up on the way home. So the positioning of them after everything else is in the interest of the customer.

the perishables could be closer together, vs having people traipse across a store to get the basics (conveniently seeing hundreds of other opportunities to load up their cart along the way). "interest of the customer" (saving money) doesn't align with "interest of the business" (maximizing rev/profit)

Completely and obviously false (the part about everything in business is about sales). It's not as sexy, but often policies are about reducing costs. Like changing suppliers to save a few pennies per item.

If it were all about sales, then I could buy widgets for $100 a unit, sell them for $50 a unit, and call it a success.

Obviously positioning matters too (hence all the garbage food at checkout), but I wouldn't by default assume that this is the case, and especially not the only driver, behind dairy placement.

No you don't. You can can walk around the outside so you only see the cheap raw produce, bakery, and dairy. There are also plenty of low margin items in the middle (canned beans) and high margin items in the back (meat and fancy dairy)

Yes.. and just like trying to get out of Ikea

Ikea is funny because it has "shortcuts" all over the place where you can bypass larger chunks of the full path. You just need to look for doorways outside the main path. Also because most (all?) it's stores follow a very similar layout, so once you've been to one, you'll find the shortcuts in the others very easily and know pretty much exactly where you'll end up. They've just made the obvious path simple enough to mindlessly follow that most people do.

I agree this is generally true, but isn’t the case with my current grocery store shockingly enough. Both are essentially at the front of the store. I’m not sure why they are the exception to the rule, but I love it none the less.