You walk into a grocery store. Breathing, touching, smelling. The sense that bombard your first steps when you walk into a grocery store. There is no mistake that the piece of local fresh cantaloupe you see when you first walk into a store is placed in perfect view, especially with it laying so elegantly next to those local fuji apples. Their colorful and contrasting aroma's filling the space and displayed just for the viewers pleasure.
We want to suggest that one of the functions of postmodern visual rhetoric in the everyday built environment is to negotiate control over your spaces. Create the contrast between what you need and what you want. Through marketing ploys and visual rhetoric, the consumers eye has been turned and molded into a consumeristic-postmodern focal point. A target for marketing. The postmodern experience is one that is created by producers to enhance consumers need and want within visual rhetoric. Although there is no singular experience that marks the postmodern, it seems clear that one of the "constitutive elements of postmodernity is the way it challenges our ability to settle or locate our identities in either time or space" (Dickenson, p.260). The reason for this unsettlement is the constant bombardment of alternate thoughts that are being placed into the mind of consumers, everyday spaces that surround the consumer and change their original intent or perception. This range of elements that fulfill our sense immediately draws consumers into touching, smelling, feeling the sites they are involved in. This initial visual draw, the built environment pulls the visitor in and creates a community with her. Gives her a reason to invest her time and effort into the specific site in which she is occupying at the time. When you connect this thought to the idea of a grocery shopping experience, it is where the consumer is being visually fed each perfectly sensual item in her path towards checking off one more item from her grocery list.
One suggestion to this reason behind why people buy more products than originally intended in their path through a grocery store is found in the claim called "Aisleness" (Sorensen, p.177): It is a simple concept based on the "observation that more merchandise packed into a store necessarily will create more aisles" (Sorenson, p.177). More visual rhetoric packed into one spot for a consumer to see will consequently turn into more items being taken in, being touched, smelt, felt. The visual rhetoric is suggested here is to fill the consumers senses and create a community surrounding every step they take. Since the aisles have been filled with more merchandise, the consequence is that there's less space for the consumer to occupy, thus it will take the audience member longer to search the aisles, and they will spend more money because they are being forced to view more products. This theory of Aisleness suggests that each aisle has been formed to be the most efficient for the consumer because it has given the consumer access to more products in a shorter amount of space, causing them to take longer to find the products they want and thus spending money on products they don't need or did not originally have intent to buy. This intentional placement gives the producer means to actually choose what the consumer buys and why they buy it. The correlation suggests that "the relation of total sales to efficiency ... is that the sooner a product is placed in the basket, the greater becomes the opportunity for the shopper to add another item. Concluding that "the producer has a good amount of control over the consumer" (Sorensen, p.177).
There is no mistake that on entering a store, the first vision shoppers see is that of organically grown fruits or vegetables piled high in wooden crates. This fresh produce is not just a display for the vision it is creating of rhetoric. As the shopper moves from display to display they engage every one of their senses. Touching, smelling, maybe tasting ... This production is what engages the audience member to be enthralled in the product more vividly. These shopper-efficiency laws are important for an advertisers role. "In the shopper space, advertising's role is to accelerate sales without increasing the shoppers effort. For shoppers, effort is largely reflected in the amount of time it takes them to acquire merchandise" (Sorensen, p.179) Thus the acceleration of sales becomes an incredibly focused attraction to the space provided and efficient marketing techniques within grocery-store sales. In fact, several studies have been done on placement influenced product sales, and most studies suggest that "the retailer can better evaluate the payoffs from changing the aisle locations" by using a "spatial model [from] in store data". (Bell, p.114)