[yamtaddle]

Yes, of course end caps are doing the same thing, prioritizing the store's needs over the shopper's. They pull the same shit with how they lay out the store, to make you spend more time in it and travel over more of it. Which turns out to mean they're not just prioritizing profit over what's personally best for their shoppers, but also over public health, when there's serious infectious disease on the loose—which is all the time, and especially every Winter, but we got a particularly memorable lesson in the cost of that sort of thing, rather recently.

[wwweston]

As serious as infectious disease is, I'm not even sure it's the biggest impact: the venn diagram of endcap products and products likely to contribute to metabolic syndromes is probably pretty close to a circle.

At least the pandemic moved a lot of shopping online and gave a margin of convenience back to customers.

[yamtaddle]

Yeah, good point.

Now I'm wondering whether all this customer-hostile activity on the part of grocery stores actually ends up being net negative for the economy. It may be a negative-sum action they're taking, in purely easy-to-quantify economic terms, without even putting a value on wasting shoppers' time or whatever extra stress or irritation that causes. A few extra flu cases per week per store can cause a lot of harm in lost productivity and medical bills, and then, as you point out, there's the way they push junk food.