The Store’s Real Floor Plan#
Lecture 2 — SLOP2236
The printed floor plan lies by omission.#
It shows where. Not how far.#
- milk sits at the back of nearly every supermarket you’ve entered
- the printed plan shows where things are, never the path forced on you to reach them
- that gap is not an oversight, it’s the layout’s whole argument
Space is a practiced place.
— Michel de Certeau
The strategy and the tactic, applied#
- strategy — the aisle order, designed from above, indifferent to any one shopper
- tactic — the habitual route your body improvises through it anyway
- the gap between the two is the whole discipline of retail geography
What the detour costs#
Every metre between the door and what you actually needed is a metre spent on someone else’s interest, not yours.
Before next week#
- bring a shopping list of three items you actually need, nothing else
- trace the store’s real floor plan against its printed one
- name at least four products your route was forced past