An endless number of tricks are used to influence you to buy goods you don’t necessarily want or need. The real trick is that almost all of these tactics operate below your conscious awareness.

How often have you walked into a store and have come out with more stuff than you planned on buying? This happens to me all the time at Costco. Costco is a big box retailer with excellent prices on all sorts interesting gear I didn’t know I needed before I walked in the door!

But when you buy food you don’t need, it usually means weight gain and a broken diet. Few people actually buy more lettuce on impulse. You buy chips, candy, soda, and all the other goodies. Retailers spend millions of dollars on consumer research. They are experts at getting you to buy things you don’t need.

Product placement is an important trick stores use to get us to buy more goods. The more visible a product is, the more we’ll buy. It happens all the time¾or it used to happen all the time¾that I would see something in end of isle display and drop it into my cart. Simply putting a product on display at the end of an isle increases sales of that item by 40 percent.

That’s the idea behind putting impulse items at check-out counters. They know we’ll see it, want it, and probably buy it.

People spend a lot of time deciding on the brand they want to buy, but they don’t spend much time thinking about how much of an item they want to buy. This means stores can use all kinds of gimmicks to trick you into buying more.

People are very influenced by numbers displayed at the point of purchase. The first number becomes our reference number for deciding how many items to buy, because we don’t think about this before seeing the sign. Researchers have found two interesting examples.

People purchase up to 30 percent more when retailers use multiple-unit pricing: a sign says something like 5 for $5 versus 1 for $1. The price per item is the same, but you will still buy more when the point of purchase sign says 5 for $5 because the number 5 becomes the reference point for how many items to buy.

When a sign says, “Soup, no limit per person,” people on average will buy three or four cans. Change the sign to say “Soup, limit 12 cans per person,” people will then purchase seven. That’s a huge unconscious increase in the quantity purchased with essentially no difference between the signs. There is not even a sale going on. But in the 12 cans per person sign the base line for making a purchase becomes the number 12.

Colorful oversized packaging, especially for kids’ products, is yet another ploy stores and manufactures use to increase sales.

Retailers employ an almost endless number of tricks to get us to buy goods we don’t necessarily want or need. But the real trick is that almost all of these tactics operate below our conscious awareness.