In Marion Nestle’s essay, The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate, she claims ” From their (supermarkets’) prospective, it is your problem if what you buy makes you eat more food than you need and more of the wrong kinds of foods in particular” (62). In my opinion, this is true. Although the supermarkets use various tactics that people have never been aware of them when they purchasing good to entice them to buy products, the final decision is on customers.

Nestle introduces several tactics that supermarkets use to increase their profits, for example, particular ways of they put the products, surveys or membership cards that they give to customers and even coordinations with food companies. From my perspective, these tactics are all justifiable, since  the supermarkets can operate better and gain profits by applying these strategies. Firms’ higher payoffs may lead to positive outcomes:  higher salaries and better welfare programs for their workers, donations to charities or  higher national GDP. Because society is a large context, even there might be some worse off situation for some people, but considering the whole, people still become better off. Furthermore, I think that everyone should have enough self-control over those unhealthy food so that they would not purchase too much even if it has low prices. Since the money is in our own pockets, supermarkets cannot force us to buy anything. The responsibility of over-purchasing actually lies on the customers. However, for those who cannot control themselves from buying things when they see low prices, they can try to restrict themselves in other aspects such as making a plan in order not to overdose too many chips  within a day or share the big sizes with other people; then, they will have the utilities of getting low-priced products without being too unhealthy.

To what degree are supermarket tactics justifiable/ ethical

where does the responsibility lie?