If you've ever got lost in a shopping centre you shouldn't beat yourself up about it because they're designed to disorient you, according to an expert.
Escalators are positioned in shops "simply to make people get lost", David Gianotten, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, told The Sydney Morning Herald, and this is just one of many tricks used by retailers to get you to spend more.
Gianotten, who's been exploring the ways of retail, noticed that there was "always an extra bank of escalators" to divert shoppers so they "spend more money". This was done to disorient visitors and "slow them down enough" so they "looked at the merchandise nearby, distracting them from their target", said the newspaper.
Experts say "nothing" has "revolutionised shopping" and "cemented" the role of the shopping centre as much as "the invention of the escalator", which was launched in the 1850s to make it "effortless" for customers to reach upstairs floors.
Yet escalators are not the only feature of the shopping experience carefully designed to part you from your money. Shopping centres rarely have clocks in them and this is for a "manipulative reason", said Metro. The lack of clocks means "time seems to evaporate", so a "twenty-minute in-and-out trip" could "easily turn into an hours-long spending sesh".
It's also "an open secret" that shops and supermarkets "use techniques to entice people into spending more money", added Metro, including making shopping trolleys larger so shoppers can fit more inside and, in an "age-old favourite", it's "quite common for pricier products to be placed at eye level". | 
