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The moral of the grocery story is that you don't want to confuse your customers. You want to plan the colors and shapes and words to suit people's expectations.

We can examine the brightly colored utensils further. Perhaps the company that manufactures these brightly colored devices chose to market their products to parents who cook at home, and who would likely be drawn, by the gentle tug of their children's leaning, to buy their stuff. In many cases the parent shares much of the same life environment as the child and may have recent associations with those primary colors. Has the product's manufacturer planned the association? Or has the tool-maker learned by trial and error that red egg-beaters sell better than black ones for some reason.

Another example: There was a blizzard the other day here in Chicago. I was driving down Bryn Mar, bewteen Lincoln and Western and I almost blew right through the stop sign. I jammed on the breaks and slowly slid into the intersection. Luckily no one was there for me to crash into. This is a classic case of the color, shape, word sequence breaking down. The stop sign was gray and white, since it was completely covered with Chicago snow, so it took me just-that-much longer to recognize because I had to rely on just the shape of the sign to remind me to stop. There were no words available. Stop signs are red for a reason. Red means stop, octogon means stop, and STOP means stop, in that order.



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