Supermarket Smarts: Ditch The Basket, Choose A Cart For Healthier Groceries

One of the easiest ways to eat healthier is to simply ban your "bad foods" from your house. You may crave junk food, but chances are you wouldn't leave your house for it (most of the time). But the tricky part of that trick is that it's hard not to buy the bad stuff at the supermarket to begin with. (Rules about shopping while hungry are cliche, but true: On an empty stomach, I always come away with a cart full of crackers, cheese, and beer.) Researchers have found one incredibly simple way to make less unhealthy food choices at the grocery store: Push a cart instead of carrying a basket.

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You might guess that carts would encourage more impulse shopping (more room for potato chips!), but apparently flexing your arm to pick up your basket at the store entrance "leads to a preference for vices over virtues, and for smaller, earlier rewards over larger, later monetary rewards," according to a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Does this seem absurd to you? I mean, really, how truly bizarre. Will researchers now test whether placing baskets atop a table or something, so customers have to reach up for them instead, might work out? Will supermarkets discourage basket stacking so one has to lean further, flex more, to pick a basket up—what impact would that have on increasing impulse buys?

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The study is part of a field of research called embodied myopia, in which "seemingly irrelevant bodily actions influence consumer behavior," and apparently there is a whole body of research showing the flex/reward tie and other weird body/behavioral connections. For a little help choosing mangoes over chocolate bars during grocery trips, try reaching for a cart no matter how small your intended shopping load: Shoppers were three times more likely to choose candy over fruit if they carried a basket!