You may have wondered why the supermarkets are all the same. It is not because the companies that operate them lack imagination. It is because they all aim at persuading people to buy things. In the supermarket, it takes a while for the mind to get into a shopping mode. This is why the area immediately inside the entrance is known as the 'decompression zone'. People need to slow down and look around, even if they are regulars. In sales terms this area is bit of a loss, so it tends to be used more for promotion. Immediately inside the first thing shoppers may come to is the fresh fruit and vegetables section. For shoppers, this makes no sense. Fruit and vegetables can be easily damaged, so they should be bought at the end, not the beginning, of a shopping trip. But what is at work here? It turns out that selecting good fresh food is a way to start shopping, and it makes people feel less guilty about reaching for the unhealthy stuff later on. Shoppers already know that everyday items, like milk, are invariably placed towards the back of a store to provide more opportunities to tempt customers. But supermarkets know shoppers know this, so they use other tricks, like placing popular items halfway along a section so that people have to walk all along the aisle looking for them. The idea is to boost 'dwell time': the length of time people spend in a store. Traditionally retailers measure 'football', as the number of people entering a store is known, but those numbers say nothing about where people go and how long they spend there. But nowadays, a piece of technology can fill the gap: the mobile phone. Path Intelligence, a British company tracked people's phones at Gunwharf Quays, a large retailer centre in Portsmouth — not by monitoring calls, but by plotting the positions of handsets as they transmit automatically to cellular networks. It found that when dwell time rose 1$ sales rose 1.3%. Such techniques are increasingly popular because of a deepening understanding about how shoppers make choices. People tell market researchers that they make rational decisions about what to buy, considering things like price, selection or convenience. But subconscious forces, involving emotion and memories, are clearly also at work. In Paragraph 2, 'decompression zone' is the area meant to______.