They are literally designed to make you buy products. The milk in the back corner is the most famous example so that you have to pass by as much product as possible to get it and have less chance of not impulse buying. End caps…all the candy right next to the checkout lane, etc.
I guess I worded it incorrectly. My point was that it's two completely different ways of selling you things. Supermarkets use all these techniques to subconsciously make you buy more things, but they rarely try to sell you a singular product.
Product websites actively try to distinguish themselves, to make you feel that the product is unique and convince you it'll make your life better. Having the same style of website for every product ever feels like something that'd actively go against the goal of the website. After all, if two things look the same, why would I pick one over the other?
As a previous bagger boy gone stocker gone high-as-a-kite meat dept clerk, the milk is in the back because it is stocked from a walk-in fridge. People don't even buy much milk.
I mean, there are certainly bonehead comments. Any time Jan 6 comes up, conspiracy theorists will come out of the woodwork and say it was a false flag operation done by Antifa or the Deep State. Nearly anything supporting NFTs is bone-headed.
But this one was just baffling on another level. Like...what do you think supermarkets exist for? Just for people to look around and go "Neat! They put a whole chicken in a can!"?[0]
[0] There actually IS a supermarket like that though. It's called Omega Mart, and it's a tourist attraction in Las Vegas. They sell weird shit like a household cleaning spray called "Who Told You This Was Butter? Seriously, Don't Eat This", "Emergency Clams", and a laundry detergent called "Plausible Deniability". But even in the case of Omega Mart, you can still buy all the products.
Supermarkets are literally designed to sell you on products. Every single product placement is from a planogram meant to juice the sales per sqft of space, from which aisle the item appears to which row and where within the row it’s positioned.