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Supermarket psychology means you’ll spend more per visit

Have you ever gone into the grocery store looking for one or two items and ended up leaving way over budget? You have forces working against you beyond your own cravings. It turns out, supermarkets have plenty of tricks and strategies they use to get the most money out of every consumer visit. According to the Food Marketing Institute, the typical supermarket sells about 40,000 different products. Moving all these fresh foods and packaged goods along before they hit expiration is imperative to the store’s success, so they don’t leave their sales simply up to chance. The layout of the store is very specific, from the fresh flowers and produce up front to the dairy in the back and packaged goods in the center aisles, everything is where it is for a reason. The best ways to avoid letting the supermarket get the best of you is to make a grocery list, stick to it,…

Too many restaurants in America are causing industry trouble

The restaurant industry can expect some troubled times ahead. After a prolonged period of growth, fueled by Wall Street, experts say the market is now oversaturated with casual, fast-food and chain restaurants, the New York Times reports. After the dot-com bust, many investors turned away from Silicon Valley and looked toward the hospitality sector for more reliable — although smaller — returns. The New York Times reported that Wall Street “poured billions into the restaurant industry.” In recent years, the number of restaurants in the U.S. — currently estimated at about 620,000 — has grown at twice the rate of the population. It’s true that customers are faced with busy lifestyles and continue to spend a large portion of their food budget at restaurants. But that dollar amount is now being spread across an ever-increasing number of establishments, so profits are divided into smaller and smaller pieces. Changes in single-store sales over time are down to the lowest they’ve been…