A lot of adults are very critical of the fans of 1D or Zoella, thinking they are silly for getting so excited, and for screaming and shouting. But did you know that fandoms have existed for a very long time? They’ve not always been called fandoms; that is a fairly recent development, but they are nothing new.
In 1800s a man called Ignatius Donnelly wrote a bestselling book called Atlantis, the Antediluvian World. After studying flood history, Ignatius put forward the suggestion that Atlantis was not fiction, but the recording of a natural disaster.
Most modern academics insist that Plato created the story, and was perhaps inspired by events that happened during his lifetime, but that the island never existed.
The subject of dreams, of magical tales and many a search, Atlantis has long captured our imagination. But where did all of this spring from?
You might have noticed that many supermarkets have a similar layout. This is no coincidence. Researchers have spent many years working out how to set out the store in order to get customers to spend more! See how many of these supermarket tricks you recognise, the next time you go shopping with your parents!
Shopping trollies are deliberately MUCH larger than needed for a weekly shop, which encourages customers to buy more. In fact, they’ve been getting bigger and bigger in the past few years.
That smell of freshly baked bread? Not only does it make you want to buy a yummy loaf, it also makes you hungry. It is well known that if you go shopping when you are hungry, you buy more!
After the bakery, comes the fruit and veg section. This often strikes me as a bit daft – by the time I get around to tins and packets of pasta, my salad is squashed at the bottom of the trolley! The bright colours tempt customers, and lots of supermarkets present fruit and veg in baskets or crates, to make it seem like they’ve come straight from the farm! Once you’ve filled your trolley with healthy produce, you’ll feel better about the packets of biscuits and crisps that come later!
Just popping in with your parents to quickly to pick up some eggs, or milk? You might notice that these essentials, and others like sugar, salt and flour, are spread around the store. The supermarket planners want you to walk around the store as much as possible, passing all those tempting special offers at the end of the aisles.
The shelves at the end of the aisles are the ones that we pay most attention to, and so supermarkets stack their special offers there, to persuade you to buy them. These are often things like fizzy drinks, that you might not normally purchase.
Supermarkets don’t just give their customers loyalty cards to encourage them to come back to their stores. They also use the data (information) collected to target their advertising better. If your parents have a loyalty card, have a look at the next letter they receive to see if they are giving discounts on products that your family often buy. Have a think about what the supermarket would know about your family – if you have a pet, when you have birthdays (e.g. if you buy a cake in the store), what toys you like, which interests you have (e.g. your parents bought a magazine about traveling to Italy).
Ok, hands up if you’ve ever asked your parents for sweets when you were at the checkout! In Germany, they have a word for this – Quengelware. The word is made up of “quengeln” which means “to whine” and “Ware”, which means products. Products that make kids whine or grump at their parents, who are fed up with the hassle of shopping and give in to their kids’ demands! Some supermarkets now advertise that they have lanes without sweets, so that parents can avoid this argument.
Talking of kids in supermarkets, did you ever notice that products aimed at kids are displayed at your eye level? The cheese strings are placed at that height in the hope that you will ask for them!
How many of these supermarket tricks did you recognise? Next time you go shopping, take a good look at how the store is laid out and see if you can find some more.
