When I go grocery shopping, I usually bring a list and have a good idea of where to find everything. So, it was quite disconcerting when my favorite supermarket was reorganized into a fresh, unfamiliar layout. Inevitably, my grocery shopping became less efficient—at least until I got used to the new arrangement.
A team of marketing researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School recently studied the paths taken by nearly 1,000 grocery shoppers, comparing their routes to paths in an idealized mathematical model known as the traveling salesman problem (TSP). They found that actual shopper behavior can deviate markedly from TSP efficiency. And shoppers who are most inefficient tend to buy more products than do those who do less wandering.