Viva Las Vegas

That's also why the essential items like milk, eggs, bread, are usually in the back of a supermarket. They hope that by forcing you through the whole store, you'll see something else that you need.

With grocery stores, there's a lot more to it than that. (Remember - I'm a marketing guy)

High-margin and perishable items like produce, pharmacy, bakery, deli, and dairy are almost always on the outside ring of any given grocery store because they want to drive customers to these sections. They want the turnover from sales, and so by having them on the outside ring they can encourage patrons to freely browse.

In contast, low-margin non-perishables can safely sit a while without impacting either the food or the store's bottom line. As such, the space used for the ring comes from these items, which are generally shoved into the middle of the store (barring overlap with the far side of the ring). Aisles here are narrower and darker, and so patrons are less likely to want to spend time here.

I've seen it happen at individual grocers: if they need more room elsewhere in the store, they'll shove the aisles in the inner field closer together.

For example, once upon a time the town I live in used to be "dry" in that stores could only sell bottles and cans of beer. Because of this, when regional chain H-E-B built a new facility in town in the 1990s they didn't allot very much space in the store for alcohol sales.

But a few years ago the law changed to allow sales of wine and ale in addition to beer. When that happened, H-E-B stole footage from some of their inner field aisles in order to allow for an alcohol aisle.


H-E-B built yet another store here a few years ago. This store was purpose-built with multiple subsections in mind, and so there was plenty of room for a dedicated alcohol area.

Confirmed.
I have even heard it voiced.
I have even heard the Croupiers are not allowed watches many times to prevent customers seeing the time that way.
I have heard it said "Its bad luck", which is a false positive, if the customers believe the clock is bad ju-ju, they wont want to see one either.

Croupiers are told if anyone asks the time, they are to say they dont know, if anyone asks how they know when its their break, the answer is the Pit boss will tell them.


No windows is a law thing...
At least it was in the UK...
Over here, it was illegal for Minors to be able to see inside any Gambling place, which is from Bookmakers up to full Casino's, so obscured glass at least in any window, or none at all.

Pub design, public bar, I have had fruit machine one arm bandit "Salesmen" trying to re-organise the layout of the bar to maximise the "draw" of the fruit machine....
"We will put it there..."
"Thats going to be in the way"
"Yes, and that way it will get more attention"....
"Sod off, thats right where my Till and Pumps are, right next to the hatch"[the bit where the barman gets in and out to collect glasses]
"Move them"
That want an Ask, that was a direct "Order"....
He didnt get any business from me.
MY Bar, MY rules, you dont ask me to throw away tables that regular punters sit at to make more room for Fruit machines, this is a Bar not a Bookmakers.

The thing was, that experience enhanced the above statement, where they were picking was the bit where the punters would have their back to the windows and doors.
As in, directly in front of the door as you came in, ...see the bight shiny... you want the bright shiny...., but no view of outside, no hint of time passing....
And right next to the wall where the TV was, so if you are sat anywhere in the place watching the game on TV, it was right in your view.....



Supermarkets, the most expensive place to put things is shelf ends.
Its well known that special offers work best on the bit between two isles, as people are looking at that more trying not to collide with it?...

The Bakery in supermarkets always has its outlet from air con fed right into the inlet for the stores air circulation, nothing sells bred faster than the smell of fresh baked.

This doesnt work with the Fish counter for some reason?...
The smell of strong fish can empty a supermarket instantly.

Putting the Milk-Bread-other essentials on the back wall to make people walk all the way through the store to get to them... confirmed as a way of forcing "Impulse Buy".

I am the public enemy number one for "Surgical Strike" shopping....
I can see the store planners run away crying when the see me at the till with JUST the milk bread and a jar of coffee, and none of the special offers....

"Managers Special"
We know he is, we can see him licking the windows.

In the case of bakeries they are at the sides of the store because you need a separate contained area both for the ovens, and for the supplies you need to have brought in every day or so. It is similar for pharmacies, although in that case security is also an issue.

In both cases it is better to build at the sides, and close off a storage/preparation area than it is to build such a structure in the middle of the store. Where it will get in the way and limit how you can rearrange the aisles. I also think that in the UK at least there are laws stipulating that ovens and cookers must have an extractor fan of some description. While possible to put such a thing into a structure in the middle of the building, the cost really isn't worth it.

I can think of only one store where the pharmacy wasn't located on the edge of the store, instead it was located near the entrance and flush against the stairs to the upper level.

As far as perishable goods go. A lot of them need refrigeration, and it is easier to fit the power sockets in the wall that run them under the floor - again because it limits what you can do in the store without having to spend money rebuilding part of it.

About the darkening of casinos thing, I can vouch for that working.

Back when I was a teenager I used to go to these all weekend LAN parties where we'd bring our own PC's and play Counter Strike and such all weekend. We usually rented a gym from a local school and blacked out the windows so the sun wouldn't shine off the screens and annoy us. At one place we frequently rented there was a 24 hour gas station store right across the street where we'd go to get snacks and drinks when we ran out. Even though there were clocks in the gym, many of us wore watches and there was always the clock at the bottom right of the Windows desktop, many of us wouldn't realize how long we'd been playing without sleep before we went outside to go to the gas station.

We'd come in on friday around 5 p.m., set everything up and start tournaments around 7 p.m. Many of us thought it was around 2-3 a.m. when we got up to get our first resupply of snacks at the gas station store and were shocked when we came outside to find it was daylight. It wasn't until then someone looked at their watch and found out it was actually more like 10 a.m. We'd been lost in our games for more than 12 hours and in this case, no one was actually trying to get us lost on purpose.

We did a remodel in our local casino that ended with an extreme push - we were working 12 hours on and 8 hours off 6 days a week (which was the maximum hours the boss could work us without going to double time, which the casino wouldn't pay for) even with windows in the employee lunch room, our only real time reference by the middle of the week was the contents of the lunch line. - we took a break every 2 hours, but we didn't know whether it was AM or PM unless there were pancakes in the lunch line.

Not a very accurate one at least. We're perfectly capable of telling whether it's been a long time or a short time since such and such, but not how much time exactly. And, like Einstein said, 10 seconds with your hand on a hotplate feels like an hour, but an hour with the woman of your dreams feels like 10 seconds.

I actually heard somewhere (don't remember where - think it may have been on an episode of "Through the Wormhole") that scientists are looking into whether schizofrenia might essentially be a time keeping defect in the human brain. That if your brain can't keep track of sequences of events, then you might think someone else moved the coffee cup that you moved a few seconds ago, or that someone else said something that you yourself did, even though no one else is around, causing you to think "invisible people" are doing these things.

There was a study done a long time back where they put subjects in a specially designed house with no windows and no clocks and then had them live their lives for a while. The found that most people would eventually work themselves into a ~24 hour routine. However, something like 1 in 6 fell into a 36 hour routine. When they emerged, they were really thrown off by oh how much time passed.