A new impulse

Self-service changed people’s shopping habits. Once a customer had decided to buy something, she or he could immediately go and pick up the product. And to promote impulsive purchases, the marketing department positioned cheap products in the «impulse centre» next to the check-out.

The principle of self-service, which Migros introduces in 1948, fundamentally changes the customers’ purchasing behaviour: ”When a customer goes past openly displayed goods, he is forced to make a decision every time he looks at a certain article: Should he buy it or not?”, as a contemporary text describes the new situation of the customer.
The time of the ”market researchers“, as the marketing specialists are called, has arrived. They have to determine the best methods for increasing turnover. In Migros, they put three-legged baskets close to the checkouts, and soon change to fixing wire baskets ”directly on the checkout“. Thus, the products are in the direct view of the waiting customers. The baskets, which are soon available in all possible types, are sometimes hung a little higher or a little lower, sometimes filled with foodstuffs and sometimes non-food articles, but never with expensive products. It is quickly proven that this system clearly increases ”the urge to buy“ and that children's articles and sale offers sell particularly well here.
When the customer decides to purchase something in front of the checkout, the experts in the early fifties already speak of an ”impulse buy“. The system proves so successful that in 1955, Migros starts to expand the checkout ”to include sale displays“. In the specialist terms of the market researchers, this extended checkout is therefore called ”impulse corpus”.