I’ve started reading a blog called Get Rich Slowly. I’m not typically in a tight financial spot most of the time these days, but I’m trying to be more aggressive about (a) cutting costs and (b) actively saving more, in a savings account. In that vein, I posted a little while ago about my view that ads are often mental poison.

Today, I read a great post from Get Rich Slowly, entitled “Beware the Insidious Power of Marketing“. In it, he highlights a book called The Consumer Trap, which discusses product management techniques such as planned obsolescence, and talks about tricks retailers use to get us to buy more. In particular, he points out an example of how displays are placed to slow us down in grocery stores (from Why We Buy).

Supermarkets are just rife with tricks designed to get you to buy stuff that you don’t need or even want. As I mentioned in my last post on the subject, Fravia’s Anti-Advertisement and Reality Cracking pages detail a number of these. In particular, see Supermarket Enslavement Secrets. Essayists on Fravia’s site tend to use over-the-top titles, partly intended (I think) to “reverse” the benign views we tend to have of people’s attempts to trick us into buying their crap. The Supermarket page dates back to 1997.