This Hilarious Costco Shopping Meme Has Fans Laughing
It's a well-known fact at this point that retail giants employ tons of sneaky tricks to make you shell out more money than you intended to, probably without even realizing it. Take, for example, the slow, ambient music that plays in the background while you do your weekly grocery shopping. Per Lifed, the music is meant to relax you and encourage you into moving about the grocery store at a slower pace so you'll shop longer. Grocery stores often stock the priciest goods at eye level or at the end of an aisle, too, so that you grab what's easiest rather than hunt for a cheaper alternative. Even the free samples that supermarkets regularly pass around are designed to trick you into spending more!
One go-to trick supermarkets almost always use is rearranging the store and sprucing up the layout. According to The Grocery Store Guy, when you walk into a grocery store and find that everything you knew has now been given a new home, you're bound to walk around the entire store looking for your desired items. And guess what that does? Walking about the entire store makes you look at everything — not just what's on your shopping list — some of which will inevitably end up in your basket.
So, when a Redditor shared a meme expressing the confusion and mayhem that Costco creates each time it rearranges the entire store so you can't find the bread you came there for, all of Reddit couldn't believe just how relatable the meme was.
Some Costco stores rearrange their layout every few weeks
A Costco employee confessed to the Reddit community that sometimes when customers ask them where a certain item is amid a freshly rearranged layout, their hilarious answer is usually, "YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE!".
Other Redditors had tons of theories as to why Costco likes to cause this confusion on purpose. One theory is that the fresh layout pushes you into wandering down aisles that you usually would not go down and add items to your cart that you never intended to, unsurprisingly bringing in more cash at the registers. One commenter even compared their shopping experience at Costco to a literal treasure hunt, and another compared it to that of Ikea: "I assume this is why Ikea is a literal maze. I always feel like a rat in an experiment when I'm there."
A stocker at Costco shared other possible reasons, as well, explaining that Costco often moves things around to make space for promotional items or to spread out items that it's running low on. Regardless of the reason, the constant rearranging of items is incredibly annoying. One Costco shopper confessed that, "I end up leaving without things that I need because I can't find them." While most items get moved into different spots pretty regularly, the general consensus is that, come rain or come shine, you will always find the bread as Costco rarely ever moves that pantry staple around.