With thousands and thousands of items to choose from in supermarkets, finding a product on the shelf can be a challenge. Naturally, consumers do not see all products nor do they consider buying all products they see. The consumer first screens the original set of products and then considers a reduced set of alternatives. The consideration set is evaluated and reduced to one alternative that is chosen (Lapersonne et al. 1995). The choice is actually a consumer choice process including several steps, e.g., orientation, evaluation, and verification (Russo and Leclerc, 1994).

In the present study we investigated consumers’ consideration sets and consumer choice processes in an experiment with 52 respondents in a supermarket. The respondents were instructed to choose one package of sandwich meat that they would like to buy. The  experiment included two displays of shelves: The first shelf contained one section of sandwich meat and one section of products like pickled garlic and sun-dried tomatoes.The second shelf contained only sandwich meat but with two distinctly different types of packaging. Where the respondents looked first, if the chosen product were in that section, and how much they looked at areas outside their consideration set were investigated. The results show that in the shelf with two categories of products the participants hardly looked at the non-target products during the orientation phase or the verification phase. In the shelf with two differently packaged sandwich meats the participants looked at both parts of the shelf during the orientation phase but significantly more at their selfselected target area during the verification phase. These results highlight the importance of products signaling appropriate attributes in order to even be looked at.