Avoid This Area Of Costco If You're An Impulse Buyer

Whether you know it or not, retailers try to optimize different aspects of your shopping experience, all in an effort to encourage you to open your wallet — in fact, there's a whole school of psychology behind it. Grocery stores play music to try and lull you into complacent spending, for one. Retailers also have a strategic reason to keep changing their layouts, as having to hunt for the products you came in for will put you in sight of more interesting products. Costco, our favorite warehouse retailer, is no stranger to hatching such plots through merchandising.

To that end, Costco's cavernous stores are meticulously arranged to tempt you into impulse spending. Specifically, it places expensive, appealing, and limited-time buys front and center in the store (remember the barrels of Jack Daniel's whiskey that were seen on Reddit?). The hope is that your path will take you directly through these displays and light up the part of your brain that is drawn to impulse buys. 

Whether the retailer is currently looking to unload high-dollar, cutting-edge electronics or luxe camping equipment, somebody up the Costco corporate ladder figured out that, if you are more likely to see it, you are more likely to want it. Accordingly, if you want to make sure you don't bust your budget or come home with a lot more stuff than you planned on, you should stick to the perimeter of the store, and especially the back. Meanwhile, avoid the center of the store like the plague.

On Reddit, Costco employees with insider knowledge of the store's floorplanning strategy admit that there are several reasons why its inventory is always being moved around. First of all, as they report, the warehouses get a ton of new stock every day. Shelving needs require that, frequently, older items get rotated for newer ones. Furthermore, these employees allege that Costco takes a "treasure hunt" approach to merchandising, based on the belief that customers like poking around for good deals. Part of the reason that stock is displayed on pallets is to make it effortless to move around with a forklift at will, in part based on micro-trends in purchasing and sales momentum.

Of course, if you are in a time crunch or shopping with a strict spending ceiling in mind, Costco's strategy can be frustrating. To outsmart the retailer at its own game, make a beeline to the parts of the store that are less likely to be touched by the ongoing game of Retail Tetris. Otherwise, if you know that you have issues with impulse shopping, you can always place a same-day delivery order from Costco, which is typically facilitated by Instacart. Social media users warn that there is a slight markup on items there, but many folks feel that is outweighed by not only the convenience, but the fact that you can more easily stick to just the items you need and avoid impulsive purchases, lightening your net spending.