基础阅读第一节《段落阅读》
TEXTA
You may have wondered why the supermarkets are all the same. It is not because the
companies that operate them lack imagination. It is because they all aim at persuading
people to buy things.
1.___________________________________________
In the supermarket, it takes a while for the mind to get into a shopping mode. This is
why the area immediately inside the entrance is known as the “decompression zone”.
People need to slow down and look around, even if they are regulars. In sales terms this
area is bit of a loss, so it tends to be used more for promotion.
2.____________________________________________
Immediately inside the first thing shoppers may come to is the fresh fruit and
vegetables section. For shoppers, this makes no sense. Fruit and vegetables can be easily
damaged, so they should be bought at the end, not the beginning, of a shopping trip. But
what is at work here? It turns out that selecting good fresh food is a way to start shopping,
and it makes people feel less guilty about reaching for the unhealthy stuff later on.
3.____________________________________________
Shoppers already know that everyday items, like milk, are invariably placed towards
the back of a store to provide more opportunities to tempt customers. But supermarkets
know shoppers know this, so they use other tricks, like placing popular items halfway
along a section so that people have to walk all along the aisle looking for them. The idea is
to boost “dwell time”: the length of time people spend in a store.
4.____________________________________________
Traditionally retailers measure “football”, as the number of people entering a store is
known, but those numbers say nothing about where people go and how long they spend
there. But nowadays, a piece of technology can fill the gap: the mobile phone. Path
Intelligence, a British company tracked people’s phones at Gunwharf Quays, a large
retailer centre in Portsmouth—not by monitoring calls, but by plotting the positions of
handsets as they transmit automatically to cellular networks. It found that when dwell time
rose 1% sales rose 1.3%.
5.____________________________________________
Such techniques are increasingly popular because of a deepening understanding about
how shoppers make choices. People tell market researchers that they make rational
decisions about what to buy, considering things like price, selection or convenience. But
subconscious forces, involving emotion and memories, are clearly also at work.
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