I can look, but I can't see!

[Amtram]

This is kind of curious. I frequently look through the supermarket ads to see if there's anything I use that's at a good sale price this week, and it sometimes drives my decision as to where I'm going to shop.

So I'm looking at one of the store ads, and they've replaced all the photo images of products with more graphic representations surrounded with thin black borders. I suppose that for most people, this would make the images "pop" and draw attention to them. For me, though, I just skimmed through, nothing drew my eye, and I have no idea whether or not there was anything in that ad that I wanted or needed.

I'm a visual thinker with associative memory. Since these things did not look like the things that I buy, I could not associate the pictures with the items, and I'm less likely to visit the store because of the advertisement!

[salleh]

Isn't that intereseting ? I myself, am more drawn to graphics than photographs, even though I am a photographer. That is when we're speaking of grocery store ads......


.......but when it comes to more technical ads, say, for equipment of any kind, I want to see exactly what it is they're advertising .....which means photographs.....


...perhaps if you got used to it....

[DADHD]

Sadly, my grocery store shopping is done with the isle to isle impulse maneuver.

[meridian]

Originally Posted by DADHD

Sadly, my grocery store shopping is done with the isle to isle impulse maneuver.

Ha! me too. Maybe that's a guy thing.

[Amtram]

I always have a list, but I go up and down all the aisles because I'll always find something that didn't get onto the list, and seeing the item allows me to picture whether we have some still or need it. I sometimes stop and stare into space in the aisle because I'm trying to picture the place where the item is kept or how much was left the last time we used it, and I'm actually pulling up a picture in my head!

salleh, it's not a matter of what draws my eye, but because I'm visualizing an actual item, a graphic depiction of that item doesn't trigger the same kind of recognition as a photographic image of that item. A can of the tomato puree that I use looks like the real can in my head, but the exact same can, in the ad, doesn't look like the real can I see in my head, so it just doesn't register. The graphic has to be translated into the image of the real can instead of having a direct relation to it. Is that making sense? That's just how it felt to me.

[Fortune]

I do the aisle to aisle thing too. So does my mother, for that matter.

I usually have a list. One time I went to a huge store without a list, and ended up with nothing. That was pretty embarrassing given I'd had my roommate drive me to the store. Oh, the humanity.

For a long time I actually had a mental checklist, so it was go to Costco, pick out everything we usually buy, and then linger around stuff not on the list and spend 15 minutes deciding which one I want to get, which always turned out to be the one I wanted in the first place.

[ADHDTigger]

NT partner built an application that creates our grocery list and spits it out with all groceries sorted by aisle and what, if any, coupons we have for the item.

I mentioned that he's NT, right?

When I was single, grocery shopping was coffee and anything that I thought I might consider eating. And Slim Fast or whatever high protein meal replacement shake was on sale.