The Treat of Not Being Tricked

By: Leslie G. Sarasin, President and CEO, Food Marketing Institute

William James, the father of modern psychology, once observed, "There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."

Whether the recent utterance from a candidate or as assertion that spreads like wildfire across social media, examples abound of a ridiculous claim’s going unchallenged, being oft repeated and beginning to attain the status of truth.  It doesn’t require scrolling too deeply into the posts on Facebook to discover verification of James’ observation.

But to see a veritable family reunion of these repeated absurdities hidden in the truthy halo of repetition, one needs only read any article that claims to “tell you what your grocer doesn’t want you to know,” or “pull back the curtain on the manipulative marketing secrets of the supermarket.” While it is convenient to blame the media for conglomerating and perpetuating the same misconceptions about such topics as psychologically manipulative store design and layout, germy grocery cart handles, and the marketing benefits and deterioration accelerations produce misters provide - the truth is, if those of us who actually know the facts fail to set the record straight, we too share blame for propagation of the myths.

The only sure cure to the problem James describes is to confront the absurdity every time we hear it. Of course, having to challenge such myths with facts so that the likelihood of repetition is lessened can be exhausting and becomes monotonous, but the alternative is that the misconceptions go unchallenged, the silence is considered assent and its repetition is allowed more fertile ground. To help in challenging supermarket myths that all too frequently are repeated, FMI has added a special page to our website dedicated to dispelling the inaccurate accusations leveled against our industry. Since launching this page, some have already responded to our invitation to add to the growing collection of supermarket myths in need of being put to rest.

I invite your scrutiny of the page, which can be accessed at www.fmi.org/SupermarketMyths. Please give us your feedback, improve on our responses, add to the list of myths we must bust, or share the link in attempt to confront these absurdities so they don’t become ”fact” through simple repetition and our failure to defend our practices. In the parlance of Halloween, we can, and should, enjoy the treat of not letting our customers be tricked by myths.