It isn't the actual premises and certainly not the staff at my local branch who are a great bunch.
It isn't even the woman at the check out in front of me last week who appeared to have based her shopping list on the possibility of the Red Army dropping in unannounced for afternoon tea.
What really annoys me is the methods that are employed to make you spend more than you need. They would probably call it merchandising or marketing. I would call it sharp practise and chicanery.
Everyone is familiar with economies of scale. It's obviously cheaper to buy a box of one hundred teabags than two boxes of fifty. Except that it isn't on occasion, it's actually more expensive.
Similarly, two 500 gram bags of sultanas should cost more than a 1kg bag but they don't from time to time. The shopper in a hurry will just grab what should, on the face of it, be the cheaper option, and ends up paying more.
Then there's the periodic rearrangement of the whole store which means nobody can find anything. I've mentioned that one before so I won't revisit it.
There's also the practise of putting the costlier items on shelves at eye level. Look down at the lower shelves and you'll find the cheaper stuff there, but how many people bother?
It's probably the same in the US, Canada and Oz, but in the UK we have unit pricing regulations which means it should be possible to compare different size packs of the same, or similar, product for value.
Here's a couple of examples:
Not difficult to see which is the least expensive, given that the packs are the same size. But why is the unit price of one expressed in pence per 100 grams, and the other one in £ per kg?
That can be annoying when you're trying to compare packs of different sizes.
It's easy enough to shift a decimal point about, but we shouldn't have to do it.