Next time you cave in to temptation at the supermarket checkout, you're not totally to blame - but who is? I'm Jason Toon and that's what we're talking about in this issue of Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. The logic behind putting candy and magazines at supermarket cash registers seems so obvious, it feels like a natural law. Of course weary shoppers will buy cheap little indulgences right as they're ready to check out, especially if their kids are begging for them. But it wasn't always thus. Somebody had to think of that. Somebody who had studied consumer behavior and was in a position to make the case to a company who could make a lot of money off of it. Like, say, the world's biggest maker of chewing gum. That somebody's name was Hawkins Stern. And that's almost all we know about him.
Go on, you deserve it… photo by Wolfmann used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license via Wikimedia Commons Shelf awareness The grocery store as we know it is barely a century old, if that. Before then, customers would tell clerks what they wanted, who would then pack up the order from barrels and crates behind the counter. The first "self-service" stores, where customers browsed the wares themselves, only got going in the late 1910s, and only haltingly. "You couldn’t just walk right in," writes Lisa C. Tolbert in her 2023 book, Beyond Piggly Wiggly, about one of the first self-service stores, the Triangle Grocerteria in Pomona, California. "A turnstile controlled the separate entrance and exit." Moreover, the stock was arranged in alphabetical order: "the 'S' section included sardines, salmon, soups, and soap." The daring new Triangle Grocerteria was featured in a magazine series on "the oddities of life." Retailers learned more customer-friendly techniques. Customers warmed to it after some initial reluctance. Self-service spread over the next few decades, with Piggly Wiggly in the lead. But even by 1946, the concept was still novel enough that a manual called Self-Service Food Stores found it necessary to advise that "food retailers must adopt some, if not all, of the features of self-service store operation if they are to prosper", such as the fact that goods displayed at eye level are easier for customers to see. And groceries were ahead of the curve: Woolworth's, the country's biggest retail chain, didn't even start dabbling in self-service until 1952. Once customers were free to browse, stores realized that they were more likely to buy things they weren't planning to, and tried to figure out how to best exploit that tendency. Photos of pre-1960 supermarkets illustrate that an embryonic concept of checkout impulse merchandising was coming together. Self-Service Food Stores shows an example of "displaying small, easily pilfered items for quick sale at the checking counters" - but only behind the counter, where you'd have to ask the clerk for them, old-school style.
Sure, Baby Ruth is good, but is it talking-to-people good? Other photos from the era are just as likely to show eggs or bread displayed at the counter as gum or cigarettes. Most commonly, there's nothing on display at all. It would take some strategic and commercial muscle to make the checkout impulse rack a universal fixture. A Stern talking-to "Retailers can capitalize on the trend to more impulse buying by creating new impulse buying centers to supplement the heavily trafficked checkout stand," said the paper in the April 1962 issue of the Journal of Marketing. At the behest of the Wrigley Corporation, industrial economist Hawkins Stern of the Stanford Research Institute had studied impulse buying. Turns out it was booming along with self-service shopping. While Americans in 1945 reported that 38.2% of their supermarket purchases were unplanned, by 1959 that number had grown to 50.9%. Stern's most influential insight, taught to marketing students to this day, was to categorize impulse purchases into four types. Two of those types are "reminder impulse buying", when seeing a product in the store reminds the shopper of a past interest in or experience with the product; and "suggestion impulse buying", where the customer's interest is piqued without any previous knowledge of the product. Both are triggered by the products being seen by customers - and there's nowhere in a grocery store more visible than the checkout, the one place every customer must go. Stern also identified the factors that make products well-suited to impulse buying, like low price, small size, and familiarity built through mass advertising and widespread availability. Maybe all this seems like it goes without saying now. But at the time, Wrigley thought these insights were worth paying Stern for, and the journal's editors thought they were worth publishing.
Some impulses are worse than others, as in this Chicago grocery store in the 1970s. If you were going to pick a company to spread this gospel in 1962, you couldn't do better than Wrigley. Once the gum behemoth got the "new impulse buying centers" ball rolling, the idea soon took over food retailers of all sizes, from supermarkets to corner stores. It's hard to find a photo of a grocery checkout after the middle of that decade without a rack of the kind of small, cheap indulgences Stern described: gum, candy, magazines, and of course, cigarettes. Stern was, of course, right about the effectiveness of impulse racks. A little too right. It took a couple of decades, but a backlash steadily built. The first candy-free checkouts started appearing in the late 1980s and 1990s. "We have heard from parents who said shopping would be so much more enjoyable if they did not have to face that candy temptation in the check-out aisles," said Eileen Katz of Giant Food in 1986 about her company's new unsweetened lane. "This is a small thing for us to do to make people happy and make shopping less annoying for parents." At the time, Ernie Moore of Safeway was blunt about why they wouldn't be following suit: "You maximize your sales by putting impulse items on the checkout stand. We're in the business to maximize our sales."
Like hiding candy from a baby. Giant Food, Washington, DC, 1986. But more and more stores joined in. Eventually, in some locations, the authorities would get involved. The UK government announced a ban on high-sugar and high-fat snacks in checkout lanes in 2020. The following year, the first municipality in America to prohibit candy and soda at store checkouts was Berkeley, California - the same city where, in 1928, Hawkins Stern was born. The unknown economist So what about the consultant who started all this? Certainly the man who shaped this pervasive, controversial aspect of modern life enjoyed widespread fame and/or infamy? Not at all. The Hawkins Stern model of impulse buying is still studied to this day. But outside the specialized niche of marketing theory, he remained a largely anonymous private citizen. He didn't parlay his lucrative insights into a role as a public intellectual. No books on the bestseller list, no Tonight Show appearances, no testimony before Congress.
The mind that launched a billion tantrums: Hawkins Stern, 1962. The facts about his life that I can glean from the Internet are scant. He graduated from UC-Berkeley. He married Mary Ellen Bain in 1954 and they had at least one child, Hunter, in 1961. Before Stanford, he worked at the Armour Research Foundation in Chicago and various advertising and sales jobs in printing and radio. In the photo published with his article in The Journal of Marketing, he looks like a typical young technical academic of the American century, putting his considerable brainpower to work optimizing corporate efficiency. At some point after Stanford, he moved to Virginia, where Mary Ellen was active in charity fundraising. He continued his consulting work, with quotes from him popping up in news stories on projects from the placement of industrial facilities in the Chesapeake region, to housing in Poughkeepsie, to a parking expansion at Gettysburg National Military Park in 1994. Beyond that, I couldn't find an obituary, or anything indicating he's still alive: he'd be 97 this year, so it's possible. That's pretty much it. Despite his impact on hundreds of millions of people around the world for decades to come, Hawkins Stern himself remains a bit of a mystery. We can only guess what he thought every time he saw some kid screaming and crying at a supermarket checkout, as a harried mom just tried to get through the gauntlet of impulse buys.
Abandon all self-control, ye who enter here. At a Winn-Dixie in Florida, 1972. Who knows, maybe we’ll find out Hawkins Stern is a Meh user, and he’ll jump right into the forum! I mean, we probably have at least one 97-year-old regular, right? What were your checkout treats? While I am pretty sure I’ve never once bought a single issue, I’ve gotta admit I enjoyed scanning the headlines of the most absurd tabloids that lined the way to the register. How about you? Let’s hear what you picked up when checking out in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat! —Dave (and the rest of Meh) Wait! Before you check out, can we tempt you with these other Shoddy Goods stories?
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