How best to make shoppers buy more?

You have to sympathise with this greengrocer. His pitch in a busy street market in central London attracts many shoppers. They like the look of the fresh fruit he has to offer. Italian peaches and nectarines, Spanish apricots and plums, Turkish figs, all delicious fruits of the summer, my own favourite time of the fruit year.

And yet. To save his stock from spoilage you understand why he has to put up signs like these telling shoppers to keep their hands off his fruit. If each of the several hundred shoppers he serves in a busy day's trading touches the fruit he's got for sale, he'll have to throw plenty of it away. And we all know that shrink costs money.

There are three supermarkets around the corner from this particular street stall, each of them selling much larger quantities of fresh fruit, and almost all of it is pre-packed. 

And yet for me, and I guess for many others, the experience of buying fruit from a street stall is something I miss. At least I'd miss it more if those warning signs weren't there. 

Sales are pretty flat at UK supermarkets. They ought to look at systems across the English Channel. Supermarkets in continental Europe seem able to engineer sales growth by offering a mix of loose and pre-packed produce. It helps make for a market feel in store.

And in turn it also underscores the essential role played by packaging in product protection and safety as well as shopper information and merchandising. 

(I ought to add that those signs only seem to appear in summer. Below you'll see that I filmed the same stall a couple of months ago and they weren't there. Shrink is less of a problem at certain times of the year.)