Supermarket aisle order, explained: how UK stores are laid out

Nothing in a supermarket is where it is by accident. The fruit by the door, the milk at the very back, the chocolate right where you queue, all of it is a decision someone made to move you through the shop a certain way and keep you in it a bit longer. Once you can see the pattern, you can shop against it.

The fresh stuff lives round the edges

Walk into pretty much any UK supermarket and you'll hit fruit and veg first. There's a reason it's the opener. Bright, fresh produce sets the tone the moment you're through the door, and it's a nicer first impression than a wall of tins. From there the fresh stuff hugs the outside walls: meat and fish, then the chilled dairy along the back.

This outer loop is the most predictable part of any shop. Whichever chain you're in, the fresh food tends to sit round the edge, mostly because the chilled cabinets are easiest to plumb in and restock against the walls.

The middle is where they get you

The centre aisles are the long-life stuff: cupboard staples, tins, pasta, cereal, cleaning bits. You came in for the fresh things round the edge, but to get from one bit of fresh to another you're routed straight past all of it. Not an accident either.

The middle is also where chains differ most. Some drop a rotating aisle of complete non-essentials right in the centre, Aldi's Specialbuys, the legendary middle of Lidl, full of power tools and ski gear you absolutely did not come in for and will somehow think hard about anyway.

And then the tills

By the time you reach the checkout you've done the work, and the shop knows it. The queue is lined with small, high-margin impulse buys: chocolate, gum, the magazines. It's the most valuable shelf space in the building. Some chains really lean on it, M&S parks its posh confectionery near the front for exactly this reason, and it works on me every single time.

Why no two chains run in the same order

Edges-then-middle is the basic skeleton. What's bolted onto it changes a lot from shop to shop, and those differences are exactly what have you doubling back. A few of the bigger ones:

• Lidl opens with the bakery, right by the door, smell and all.
• Iceland puts frozen first, because frozen is the reason you're there.
• Asda keeps the beer, wine and spirits walled off well past the food.
• Costco is a warehouse: non-food pallets between the fresh and the ambient, freezer right at the back.
• The Irish chains, SuperValu, Dunnes and Centra, tend to keep the bakery on the front perimeter rather than mid-shop.

I mapped the running order for 14 UK and Irish supermarkets, each based on how that chain usually sets a store out. Worth a flick through even just to see how differently two shops you use every week are actually arranged.

Using the layout instead of fighting it

You can't move where the shop puts things. But you can put your list in the same order as the aisles you're about to walk, and that flips the layout from something working against you into a route you follow once, top to bottom.

Doing that by hand every week is the boring bit, which is the whole reason Ticklyst does it for you. Type your items, pick your shop, and the list reorders to match that store's actual running order. The maze turns back into a map.