I had a though recently. It would be neato to have some open source, crowdsourced world database of item locations, where you add this sort of information.

Tagged search of a store, where certain items are. What's stores in a city sell X item. That sort of thing.

Call it "WorldDB", bake it into OpenStreetMap.

No idea what the legality would be, but I would LOVE it.

May write a post about it at some point, as I am no programmer.

Well of COURSE the butter is in the Beer & Wine aisle. I mean where ELSE would you expect to find butter? In the DAIRY section? It is to laugh.

Corporate metric improved: people spend more time in our stores now!

A supermarket I go to sometimes around a year ago decided to "reorganize" everything. The first day I went there after the reorganization I almost suffered a meltdown. You know where they put the biscuits and cookies?

You guessed it! In the same aisle than stationery and printer ink. I am not kidding, the psychopath who did this, for some reason decided that printer ink was somehow related to breakfast biscuits.

This is honestly pretty frequent if you shop for anything beyond staple items. Like, pine nuts are not with the other nuts, for example. Cocktail garnishes are not with the other pickles. Canning pectin is not with the jello, etc.

You just can't really trust the signs that much. At least in this case it was an entire visible section and not a single tiny box they hid among a bunch of tangentially related items.

It's all intentional to get you to walk around the store more so you make more impulse buys. Same reason stores will reorganize things from time to time

If looked at in a certain way butter is a chilled beverage.

Nothing like the old wine/butter aisle

Guess I’m built different, I noticed the butter immediately but took 2 minutes to figure out what the problem was before I saw the sign

I think my head would explode if that happened to me. I'd just start moving it back to the dairy for them while tutting very loud.

Clearly butter is popular with beer drinkers. 2 cases of beer 2 lbs of butter, what a fun night awaits. Slip slidin' away!

I like a buttery Chardonnay

I used to live a couple blocks from a Safeway that decided to put the canned beans and canned chili in the wine aisle, with no sign to direct you there. Is throwing random shit in the wine aisle just a Safeway tradition?

I wish grocery stores (especially those you can also order from online) had a page where you could pick the store (if there are multiple) and then search for the thing you need and it had a number label that would be associated with the section it is in. This weird example from op would be: beer 10, butter 10, wine 10 etc without it being confusing because it isn't a category anymore and you only need to look in that section instead of looking like a lost kid running around in the whole store. Also filling up that big sign with just a number would be a lot easier to read from far away.

They can keep the categories if they stick to them, like meat, bread, snacks and so on so ppl who do not care about the number system can still kinda guess like today...

At least you know it's somewhere in the fridge section, yah?

But I'm sure everyone has done that while looking for something and it is not cool.