Antigrammatical selling

I was just wandering through Reading (England) and saw a sign 'Bag Shop through Sainsbary'. It made me pause and look to see what it meant. In fact it meant 'through Sainsbury's', which is a well-known UK supermarket chain.

Score one to the bag shop. In all the welter of signs, theirs made me stop and think.

Then a secondary effect took hold. If they are stupid enough to spell the name so wrong, I wondered, maybe they won't be too clever about pricing either. So I went to have a look I didn't buy anything, though I was impressed again by their attention and sales ardour. Indeed, they didn't seem terribly sophisticated and spoke in broken English, but I bet they do very well, even though they are tucked away in a back street.

It made me think also of market stalls that sell apple's, orange's and other apostrophically-challenged words, and I wondered if there was a similar effect there and even if there's some ecological effect of the bad spellers surviving better than the good spellers.

There's a common theme here, it seems:

Catch the eye with bad spelling or grammar

Appear less intelligent than the customer

Sell with enthusiasm

A noteworthy point is that we trust less those who are superior to us in some way as they could do us harm. In reverse, we trust more those we feel are inferior. And, as half of selling is about gaining trust, then appearing less intelligent is a neat ploy.

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