Same same, different
The guy who recently bought our supermarket has made a whole lot of changes.
He’s moved whole categories around, introduced new lines and display cabinets, cleared out promotional space and even put in orange juice and pineapple cutting machines. It’s all different.
What’s the problem? Meddling with people’s familiar shopping environments is a dicey business.
Stand at the entrance of any supermarket and watch people move. Most don't wander. They trolley along a familiar route they've walked a hundred times before, past shelves they barely need to look at, reaching for the same brand of pasta sauce, the same cereal, the same brand of laundry powder they bought last week, and the week before that.
Then, every so often, they will pause at a new product display, pick something up, turn it over, and contemplate: this time I might just try something different. That small tension, between the comfort of the familiar and the pull of the new, is one of the most profound patterns in shopper behaviour.
The pull of the familiar
Habitual buying isn't laziness, it's efficiency. The typical grocery trip involves dozens of tiny decisions, and the brain conserves energy by automating as many of them as possible.
Leaning to the familiar is called the status quo bias in which people prefer that things stay the same, because change carries a perceived risk even when the alternative might be better. Related to this is the exposure effect, which shows that repeated exposure to a stimulus can increase our liking for it, regardless of its actual merits. The more we've seen a product, the safer and more trustworthy it feels.
Habits also function as cognitive shortcuts, or heuristics. Once a "habit loop" forms – a trigger, a routine, and a reward - the brain stops evaluating alternatives altogether. Reaching for a familiar brand isn't really a decision anymore, it's closer to an instinctive reflex. This is compounded by loss aversion, in which people feel the pain of a bad new purchase such as inferior quality or social criticism from the family at home more sharply than the pleasure of a good experience.
The pull of the new
Humans are complicated creatures. While we love familiar favourites we also like things fresh and different.
Variety-seeking behaviour is something we also all enjoy, especially in low-risk, low-cost categories like snacks or drinks, where trying something new costs little and the psychological reward of novelty is high. This taps into hedonic adaptation, the idea that repeated consumption of the same thing gradually reduces the pleasure it brings, prompting people to seek novelty simply to restore a sense of enjoyment.
Marketers can tap into this directly with tactics like limited-edition flavours and added-value short-term promotions, which rekindle curiosity and urgency through a fear of missing out.
Familiar hunting ground
Familiarity in supermarkets is also important for customers psychologically because it comforts them that there is a continuity of food supply. Our ancient, instinctive brains need to know that there is food for the home tribe, and any threat to that triggers alarm bells. We see this play out on the few occasions when supermarkets are closed for a day, or when there is a threatened shortage. People are very quick to panic-buy and over-stock.
So, now that the local community has been traumatised by rapid changes, will it be better in the long run? I’m going to get a pineapple sliced up in store and have a think about it.