Our Waitrose has a fraught decision – put the fruit and veg at the back where the door to the car park is, or the front where the street access is. You can guess which won, so the fruit and veg is at the rear. Supermarkets have put a lot of (well-researched) effort into pretending to the markets and stores they killed off, so yes, they want you to see the fresh stuff first, but the money is in the packaged and processed. Once they've sold you virtue and pretended they're a friendly, fresh well-stocked market, they quickly move into selling you high-margin 'trinket' food, the whoo-another-flavour-of-crisps effect. Acquisitional novelty.
There's been a big change is how we shop, of course. We drive to a supermarket and fill a car boot with things we want to keep for a week, rather than fresh stuff for the day. If you plan to cook with fresh ingredients, that immediately requires some pre-planning around use-dates, otherwise you end up with out-of-date risky fish and a self-harming courgette by Friday. There's a none-too-suitable push to manufactured products in that. Back when we used to go to the office, we used the buck-the-trend and try and buy for the day (not a cheap option in London admittedly, but far more satisfying to decide what you fancy for tea and popping out at lunch to get the ingredients). Working from home in a town where the supermarkets have killed most of the smaller stores, we're back in weekly shop mode, and honestly, it's grim and soulless, wandering around a warehouse trying to decide what I might want to eat in six days time. And in part, that helps turn food – a major sensory pleasure – into passionless consumption.
Supermarkets paint themselves as a liberators of the customer, but that's another big lie, they are more expensive and offer little actual choice, and force us into purchase and consumption patterns that aren't even close to being in our interest.