1. That companies feed off our impulse buying based on the quantity of items that the consumer sees before reaching the items that they originally came for. They make large profits on this, as well as on size differences for cheaply produced items such as soda. 2. To show what the consumers purchase, and to be able to know where to place the items throughout the store. The way that supermarkets set up their stores is to maximize the number of products you see before you find the product you were originally searching for, to the point just before getting so overwhelmed that you “run screaming from the store.”