The song playing when you walked into the grocery store this morning was not random. It was a decision, made with knowledge of decades of consumer psychology research, designed to influence exactly how long you linger in the dairy aisle and whether you toss that extra bottle of wine into your cart. Grocery store music spending is a subject retailers have been studying for a very long time, and the findings are specific enough to be genuinely uncomfortable.
Researchers have been documenting the precise effects of tempo, volume, genre, and even the day of the week on how much money you hand over at the checkout. The effect isn’t theoretical, and it isn’t small. This is one of the more well-worn fields in retail psychology, with findings going back more than four decades and continuing right into the present year.
Almost none of the shoppers affected by this music realize it’s happening. You reach for the more expensive bottle. You stroll rather than stride. You pick up the fancy yogurt because something about the atmosphere made the whole store feel a little more worth it. You pay, you leave, and you have no idea.
The Tempo Trick That Started It All
The foundational work on grocery store music spending came from Milliman’s 1982 study published in the Journal of Marketing. Working directly inside a supermarket, Milliman measured shoppers’ pace and their total purchases under different musical conditions. He played songs of varying tempos as background music, tracking the speed at which customers moved through the store. When fast-paced music played, shoppers walked quickly, giving themselves less time to make impulsive purchases. When slow-tempo music played, they slowed down and bought more.
Milliman found that supermarket sales were 38 percent higher on days when slow-tempo music played. That’s more than a third in additional revenue, produced purely by the pace of the background music. No sale. No coupons. No additional staffing. Just slower music, and shoppers who didn’t notice they were staying longer.
The explanation has to do with a psychological model known as the PAD (pleasure, arousal, and dominance) framework, which describes how people’s moods respond to their environment. Fast music increases arousal and keeps people moving. Slow music does the opposite: it dials down urgency, makes the shopping experience feel more pleasant, and encourages browsing over efficiency. Browsing, in retail terms, is another word for spending.
When noisy music plays in a supermarket, consumers spend less time in the store. When softer music plays, they spend more. Higher volume negatively affects final ticket sales, and volume that is too jarring creates a distressed response in shoppers. Grocery stores want you calm and moving slowly, not alert and moving fast. The playlist is calibrated to that end.
The Day You Shop Changes Everything
The effect of in-store music on spending is not constant across the week. A study that analyzed roughly 150,000 shopping trips at a Swedish supermarket chain, later published in the Journal of Marketing Research, found a pattern nobody in the industry expected.
People who grocery shop Monday to Thursday can expect in-store music to increase their bill by more than 10 percent, according to research from the University of Bath’s School of Management. Weekday shoppers tend to be mentally tired from the working week, and pleasant music played in-store lifts their mood, making their decision-making on shopping items more intuitive. With less scrutiny of purchases, people buy more products, treating themselves to additional items or upgrading the quality of planned purchases.
The process at work here is mental depletion: the kind of cognitive tiredness that comes from a full day of decisions, deadlines, and other people’s needs. Shoppers are more mentally depleted on weekdays than on weekends, and a final study in the research demonstrated mental depletion as the driving factor for how shoppers are affected by music during different parts of the week. When consumers are depleted, music increases their emotional affect, which then mediates the impact on sales.
By Friday, as people head into the weekend, they are already feeling less depleted, and music loses its power. People have more time, they feel more relaxed and happier. Weekend shoppers process information more deliberately and are simply less susceptible to ambient influence. The same song playing on a Tuesday evening and a Saturday morning produces measurably different results at the register.
Professor Jens Nordfält, co-director of the University of Bath’s Retail Lab, noted that grocers can expect a roughly 11 percent boost in weekday sales revenue when they play light, lyric-free music. A playlist designed to soothe a tired midweek shopper is, in practice, designed to make her less critical of what she’s putting in her cart.
Genre Does More Than Set a Mood
Tempo is the most studied variable, but genre has its own documented effects, and they operate on a more specific level. The most striking example comes from a series of experiments conducted in the wine section of a UK supermarket, where researchers played French accordion music on some days and stereotypically German brass-band music on others.
Researchers conducted a field study in a UK supermarket to observe how in-store music impacted wine purchasing choices. When French music was played, buyers bought more French wine. Conversely, when German music was played, German wine outsold the French. When participants were asked whether the music influenced their choice, most said it didn’t.
French music led to French wine outselling German by five bottles to one, whereas German music led to German wine outselling French by two bottles to one. The shoppers weren’t told what nationality the music represented; they simply heard accordion sounds and later reached for a Bordeaux without quite knowing why. Researchers describe this as cognitive priming: the music activates associations stored in memory, and those associations quietly steer decision-making toward congruent choices.
This same logic extends to classical music and perceived product quality. On days when classical music played near the wine shelves, customers would spend more in the shop, purchasing more expensive types of wine than when they heard chart music.
A 2025 study published in Marketing Letters built on this directly, examining how music style affects the upper price thresholds shoppers are willing to accept. The 2025 Marketing Letters study found that music style had no significant influence on the minimum acceptable price, but that pleasure level and product type both moderated the effect of music style on the maximum price a shopper was willing to pay. Classical music doesn’t change your floor (you still won’t buy something that looks terrible), but it raises your ceiling.
Familiar vs. Unfamiliar: The Time Warp Effect
There’s a second genre-related effect that has nothing to do with the style of music and everything to do with whether you recognize it. Yalch and Spangenberg’s study examined what happens when stores play well-known tracks versus unfamiliar ones, and the results were counterintuitive.
Consumers believe they spend more time shopping when familiar music is playing, even though they actually spend more time shopping when unfamiliar music plays. The perceived and actual experiences diverge. When you hear a song you know, time seems to pass more slowly: the song gives your brain a temporal reference point, and you feel like you’ve been there longer. When the music is unfamiliar, you lose track of time entirely, and you end up browsing for longer without realizing it.
For grocery stores aiming to maximize browsing time, there’s actually a case for occasionally playing music their customers won’t immediately recognize. It’s a more subtle play than the tempo or genre approach, but the underlying principle is consistent: the store’s goal is to keep you in the building, and everything in the environment is working toward that end. That includes grocery store trips you take on a Tuesday after work, which, it turns out, are the most expensive ones you make all week.
Volume, Noise, and the Limits of the Effect
Not every musical choice benefits retailers. The research is fairly consistent on volume: louder is not better. Studies found that when noisy music plays in a supermarket, consumers spend less time in the store, and when softer music plays, consumers spend more time. Higher volume in supermarkets negatively affects final ticket sales. There’s a threshold past which the music stops being atmospheric and starts being an irritant, and irritated shoppers leave.
The same is true of music that doesn’t match the store’s overall identity. Research from a high-end Swedish supermarket found that when background music felt incongruent with the brand’s image, it undermined the positive effects. The music has to be doing two things at once: lifting the shopper’s mood and reinforcing the store’s positioning. A discount grocer playing Mozart creates a mismatch that confuses rather than persuades. A premium supermarket playing aggressive pop music does the same in the other direction.
When music evokes a positive response and stimulates the shopper, consumers spend more time browsing, which leads to higher sales. But when the music has the opposite effect, it can push shoppers away. The lever only works when it’s calibrated. An ill-chosen playlist doesn’t just fail to increase spending; it can actively drive customers out.
Read More: 15 Supermarket Purchases That Aren’t Worth Your Money
What This Actually Means for Your Cart
The research doesn’t mean that every extra dollar you’ve spent at a grocery store was manufactured by a clever sound system. Hunger, habit, toddlers demanding cereal, the fact that you always forget to check what’s already in the pantry: these are real. But grocery store music spending is a documented, measurable factor in how much you leave behind at the register.
A few things follow from the research that are genuinely practical. Shopping on weekends instead of weekday evenings removes one of the cleaner documented effects. Arriving with a specific list and working through it efficiently, rather than browsing, narrows the window for impulse additions. And being aware that classical or ambient music near the wine section is specifically calibrated to make you more comfortable reaching for a pricier bottle gives you at least the option to decide consciously rather than by feel.
You’re not imagining it when a particular store consistently costs you more than you planned to spend. The store is not neutral. The music is not background noise. It is an operational tool with a well-documented return on investment, and the fact that it works best when shoppers are tired and unaware is not an accident.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.