Appearing before a Senate subcommittee under a grant of immunity, veteran retail layout architect Kenneth Ostrow admitted Thursday that modern supermarket geography was engineered to exhaust the human prefrontal cortex before shoppers reach the milk.
“If the eggs were by the door, a mother working two jobs is out in six minutes,” Ostrow testified, pointing to a diagram labeled Operation Cart Fatigue. “We can’t have that.”
Asked why the milk is in the back, Ostrow said, “Because the milk is why she came.”
Asked about the music, he said, “Slow tempo. Sixty-eight beats a minute. You walk at the speed of the song.”
Ostrow confirmed the forced march is lined with end-caps leased to the highest bidder, and that the highest bidder is usually corn syrup wearing a different hat.
Pressed on whether any of this was illegal, Ostrow said it was not, which he described as “the part I’d fix.”
At press time the subcommittee had recessed, and three senators were reportedly unable to find the exit.
