How To Really Understand Gruen Effect - An image of a shopping mall on the left. In the centre, an arrow points from left to right. On the right is an illustration of what appears to be a maze like floor plan with a path marked from entry to exit.

Gruen effect (also known as Gruen transfer) is a psychophysics concept that subtly underlies your supermarket and shopping mall experiences. When was the last time that you visited your nearby supermarket to pick up toilet paper and ended up buying a whole list of items that you did NOT plan to buy? If that sounds familiar and worrying, here is something more to add to your worry: you actually forgot the toilet paper!

“Oh come on! That smoothie-maker was on offer! Besides, I could use more chips and cookies back home. I’ll just get the toilet paper tomorrow.”

This is the kind of typical rhetoric we tell ourselves after we mess up like this. But wait! Did you really believe that you messed up? Well okay, I am not here to liberate you from that feeling entirely; if you fail your purchase-plan, it is indeed your responsibility.

However, all I am saying is that the odds were stacked against you right from the get-go! Your friendly neighbourhood supermarket uses the Gruen effect to trick/manipulate you into making impulse purchases.

In this essay, I start by covering the historical origin of the Gruen effect. Following this, I dive into the various applications of this concept in contemporary physical shops and stores. Finally, I touch upon strategies of how you could benefit from all this knowledge and save money on your future shopping trips. Without any further ado, let us begin.

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The Origin of the Gruen Effect

In order to understand the history of the Gruen effect, we need to start with the person after whom it is named. Victor David Grünbaum was born in 1903 to a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. He studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and went on to operate his own architectural firm in Vienna.

However, good things don’t last forever. As Germany took over Austria in 1938 (just before World War II), Grünbaum fled to the United States of America. As an architect with eight dollars in his possession and no English at his disposal, he changed his name to “Victor Gruen” and made a living as a draftsman.

With time, his work gained popularity and he started getting side-commissions for his shop designs. In 1951, Gruen founded “Victor Gruen Associates”, which would become a legendary architectural firm in American history.

Due to the wars back then, people had little money to spend, and “window shopping” was the only alternative for most people. Gruen set to work by manipulating light and space around products to entice the window shoppers into buyers (the ‘OG’ impulse buyer).

Furthermore, he hated America’s car-culture and wanted to design a space that treasured pedestrians and promoted discovery through walking and strolling.

The result: shopping malls. Victor Gruen was the pioneer architect behind America’s very first shopping malls. As time went on, the psychological effect that the shopping space in shopping malls would have on customers came to be known as the Gruen effect.

How to Use the Gruen Effect to Design Your Own Shopping Space?

Suppose that you wish to open a new shopping outlet in town. How would you go about it? We have got to start somewhere. So, let us consider a few options. Here is one:

How To Really Understand Gruen Effect — An illustration of a grid-based floor plan with a straight-lines-based path marked with arrows from entry to target. On the top-left is a space for storage. On the bottom is the checkout isle.
Illustration of a grid layout — created by the author

What we have is a grid layout. Grid layouts are often implemented for speed, efficiency, and convenience. It would be a great solution for a manufacturing floor space.

But remember, we are trying to be as profitable as possible. So, let us keep on exploring other possibilities. The one below is a free-form layout:

How To Really Understand Gruen Effect — An illustration of a free-form layout where significant display items/products are spaced from each other liberally. Customers have the possibility to move about freely and discover products that interest them. To show this, two differently coloured straight-line paths with arrows are shown as examples.
Illustration of a free-form layout — created by the author

Such a free-form layout promotes “exploration” and a sense of freedom. Have you ever been to one of those Apple showrooms? Suppose that you are not in the suave business of selling high-end electronics.

Instead, let us say that you are trying to sell furniture and home goods. Then, the following is the layout you should go for:

How To Really Understand Gruen Effect — An illustration of a maze layout. Here a customer enters, only to be led along a linear maze-like layout that appears confusing. There appears to be no apparent way to exit unless the customer follows the entire maze-path. Consequently, the maze layout seems to maximise the distance covered by the consumer.
Illustration of a maze layout — created by the author

The first word that should come to your mind when you see this layout is “maze”. However, I would not blame you if the first word that came to your mind was “Ikea” instead. Why would any business aiming to maximize profit go for such a confusing layout? Let us find out.

Contemporary Business Tactics Using the Gruen Effect

Let us go back to the time when you visited your friendly neighbourhood supermarket to pick up toilet paper. While you might (fairly) feel responsible for your poor purchasing behaviour, let us look at the other side of the game here.

From the outside, the building appears unappealing and bland. You don’t get to see most of what is for sale from the outside. So, it is inside that all the magic happens.

The typical modern supermarket is designed to overwhelm you with a maze-like confusing layout. The goal here is to make you cover as much distance inside the maze as possible. The more ground you cover, the more products you get exposed to, and the higher the chances are that you make impulse purchases.

Big players like Ikea and mega shopping malls use sensors to track customer movement data. Using big data, they have optimised their layouts to the T for maximum customer time. Moreover, the lighting, the music, and the smells are all perfectly curated for one specific purpose: to maximise profit. Unfortunately for you and me, this means more impulse purchases.

So, what DO we do about this situation?

How to Save Money on Shopping Trips?

The majority of consumers are typically unaware of the Gruen effect subtly working in the background. But by being aware of the factors working against your wallet while shopping, you could save some of your hard-earned money.

Here are some general tactics that work in counteracting/resisting the Gruen Effect:

1. Mindfulness — When you are mindful throughout your shopping experience, you perceive things with a higher purpose (sounds cheesy, I know; but it works). By being mindful, you are likely to feel detached from the marketing ploys and make better purchase decisions.

2. Shopping list — Sometimes, there’s nothing that comes in handy like the good old shopping list. Such a list helps you to stick to a rigid plan. And any deviations from such a plan also require you to deviate from the path of least resistance.

3. Avoid going to the supermarket when you are hungry or emotionally stimulated — I have been following this heuristic for years now and have benefited a great deal from it.

4. Consider paying with cash — In today’s age of NFC and contact-less payment, paying with cash appears so backward. However, the psychology here is that we, as human beings, lose perspective of the amounts we spend when we pay with cards or go contact-less. When we pay with paper cash, we have a tangible understanding of how much we are spending.

Final Remarks

Victor Gruen was a contradictory man. He hated the American car-culture, but could not accept the fact that people had to drive cars to visit his shopping mall designs. His original vision was to empower people by designing pedestrian shopping utopias. However, when capitalism turned his brain-child into a Frankenstein that manipulated customers, he famously remarked:

“I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments.”

— Victor Gruen

This affected him so much that towards the end of this life, he hated the notion of shopping malls. It is then ironical that Gruen effect is named after a person who actually hated the effect and had inadvertently caused its creation.

But knowing human nature, this would have happened with or without Victor Gruen’s involvement.

You might think that with the advent of online shopping, this issue would not be a worry any more. But statistics show that the issue is here to stay.

If you and I could actually stick to buying toilet paper when we plan to buy toilet paper, not only will it do our wallets good, but we might just help clear Gruen’s name a little bit!

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Further reading that might interest you: Why Earning More Leads To Lesser Satisfaction? and How To Debunk Astrology Using The Barnum Effect?

If you would like to support me as an author, consider contributing on Patreon.

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