About
An independent enthusiast blog about the design of shop floors.
This site is written by one person who got interested in why the milk is where it is and did not stop. It is not a consumer campaign, an industry publication or an advice column. It is a record of technique: 21 entries, six sections, one shop floor taken apart in the order a shopper walks it.
Why observation only
Retail design is unusually legible once you know its vocabulary. A gondola, a facing, an end-cap and a decompression zone are all trade terms with definitions, and most of what looks like coincidence in a shop is a decision that somebody was paid to make. Describing those decisions is the whole ambition here — the reader can decide what, if anything, to do about them.
The drawings
The plan and elevation drawings on this site are generic: a composite large-format grocery floor and a standard six-band gondola. They are there to locate a technique, not to depict a particular shop.