Comment by TeMPOraL
2 years ago
Obviously, they'd put the most popular flavor way at the back of the store, and the least popular flavors at the front. The store is not in the business of maximizing throughput of customers - quite the opposite, they want customers to spend more time walking and getting lost between shelves, as this maximizes the amount of wares moved.
I believe the aisle caps are bid for, and then arranged by, the manufacturers. The store just sells them the space.
The manufacturer is unlikely to see a problem with putting a display of very popular products right at the front of the store where people can't help but see it.
So you think Vanilla Inc, the company that only makes vanilla flavor ice cream, is paying for a whole chiller that they fill with vanilla, since all the other flavors are not as popular?
Or perhaps, unbeknownst to everyone in the world who uses the word 'vanilla' to mean 'mundane', vanilla ice cream actually enjoys far higher profit margins than all other ice cream.
No, I think Dreyers, the company that makes ice cream, uses the limited space available in the aisle cap to showcase one or two of their most popular flavors. (Or one or two flavors that are seasonally relevant.) That's a totally normal use of the aisle cap, just like how a Triscuits aisle cap is all original Triscuits and the many secondary flavors that Triscuits come in have to be found in the crackers aisle.
It would be literally impossible for an aisle cap to feature every ice cream flavor available - there are so many that each flavor would have very little representation in the display, and the concept would fall apart as soon as anyone bought something from it. At that point, you're paying a bunch of extra money to send the message "check out our least popular flavors".
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