Which brings me to Boots and these photos. Something about the way they lay out the stores just does not work on a visual, visceral level.  I haven't really captured it here but standing there yesterday I was trying to figure out what it was/is that felt so wrong/odd about the store. The individual elements are nice and clear - the 'please pay here' and 'electric toothbrushes' are nice and clear, a friendly font and nice contrast but somehow when they put all the elements together it just does not work. And all branches of Boots are the same. I've never been in one that didn't feel slightly odd.

What is it? Something about the placement of things in the store. The racks of shelves are too close together and too high so it feels cramped and packed in. The shelves are jammed full with no breathing space and festooned with loads of things like shelf edge tickets that stick out. I find the sheer visual assault of all this information slightly threatening and it's quite hard to work out where they want you to look and at what first. Towards the rear of the store the racks are even higher. There's very little room to breathe visually. The combined effect of all of this is that these stores feel scruffy and poorly thought out. Like a garage sale with no thought of placement, organisation, contrast and design. Surely it must harm sales. It's just all way too noisy.

I'm not sure the colours work either. Another example is Sainsbury's whose supermarkets always manage to feel slightly downmarket inside no matter what they do and no matter that actually they are aimed at a different demographic, they feel downmarket and I think it is almost entirely down to their brown and orange colour scheme which feels dated. Also too in those supermarkets the racks are too high and global navigation - being able to place myself in the store relative to where I am and relative to what I want is very, very hard. Oddly, Tesco who started life as a downmarket retailer have really worked on their stores and are much easier to navigate round. Again I don't really know why - something about the colour scheme (red, blue, white) and the placement of racks and shelves, particularly the height of them. There are a lot fewer distracting visual elements in a Tesco store - fewer flappy shelf edge markers etc. Or is it just because I am used to it?

I'm not really sure that I've hit on it here or even that I really understand it. I just know that when I go into Boots, something about the visual assault means that I feel my adrenaline rise almost as if the threat level has risen. Same with most Sainsbury's. M&S inspires a different reaction - just naked rage. Their racks are so high and uniquely have almost no aids to navigation. Unless you know the store you can wander in circles for ages trying to find the prawns or whatever. No visual assault there, just a total lack of help.

It's amazing how hard it is to buy lunch in a British supermarket. I normally buy a sandwich, drink and crisps. It would seem sensible to put these three items next to each other as I'm not the only one. Incredible how few places do this. If the FSA really wants to encourage healthy eating instead of nagging the supermarkets it would be easier to tell them to put the healthy stuff next to each other in combinations that make sense to some bloke who wants his lunch in a hurry.

The other odd thing is that I'm pretty sure there is a whole science of people devoted to retail design and placement. Why can't any of these people see this? It appears that none of them actually shop in the places they design or maybe their focus is so firmly on tricking extra sales out of us that they miss the most straightforward way of encouraging extra sales - making it easier to buy stuff.