A measure of evil

Take a little stroll down to your local grocery store to buy bread and milk and you will find almost without exception that you are required to go to both the back left and back right corners of the store to acquire them.  It is standard retail practice to set up the store in such a way that customers have to walk as far as possible to get their basic necessities to maximize their chances of making impulse buys and grocery stores are no exception.  I was wondering a little while ago just how much evil these places are capable of.  Specifically I was trying to sort out if they deliberately took cashiers off duty when the lines got fairly low to make sure customers always had to wait.  A significant chunk of the store's profit comes from people buying items at the checkout counters like chocolate bars and magazines because those items have such huge margins, but does the store deliberately inconvenience customers in an attempt to sell more of those?  I know that they will never call extra cashiers until the lines are completely blocking the aisles and people simply can't move about the store reasonably at all, so I know they are not trying to avoid congestion.  I know they immediately remove cashiers as soon as the lines stop being a congested mess and never leave cashiers working long enough to get the lines down to 1-2 people.  Do they deliberately set it up such that customers must wait in line just to sell more magazines?  I don't know, but it since their system seems like the optimal one if their only desire is to sell addons I suspect this is exactly what they do.  Unfortunately I don't think they consider how many sales they lose when customers get disgusted with the congestion and wait times and go elsewhere for their purchases, which hurts them as well as the people standing in line.

Grocery stores obviously aren't the only places that are guilty of shenanigans.  Back in the summer when I was in the local health food / herbal medicine store I listened to a conversation between a staff member and a customer about buying herbal supplements for the health problems the customer had.  The customer related how his doctor had been unable to solve his problem to his satisfaction and asked what supplements the store would recommend.  The staffer answered "Some people find this works" while pointing to a particular bottle, but when the customer asked about other solutions the staffer gave precisely the same answer about everything that came up.  The customer got more and more agitated, seeking answers and information instead of platitudes, but came up empty handed.  I wanted to jump in and say "Those random herbs are all equally good for your problem - they will all help exactly as much as you would expect from a placebo." but decided that the customer was probably headed to that conclusion on his own.  It makes me crazy to see these stores set up sections with racks and racks of 'cures' organized by the problems they are supposed to assist with.  If the damn things worked you would have confidence intervals and descriptions and information for the customer; instead they only offer the plausible deniability of not being dangerous.  My favourite quote on the subject is one from Tim Minchin "You know what they call alternative medicine that works?  MEDICINE!"

I am certainly not innocent in the realm of fleecing customers.  A 5 year stint in retail selling mattresses is not the place to hone your sense of justice but it is a great learning experience if you want to understand exactly how and when people lie, obfuscate and misdirect.  The only thing I really want to know is whether the people involved in selling all these fictions and directing customers to their will really know exactly what they are doing or simply manage to be evil and dastardly by accident.