Items Left in the Wrong Aisle Come in Five Kinds

A Five-Kind Taxonomy of Supermarket Orphans, and the Return-Tag Round for Campus Retail

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement sorts 1,412 items left in the wrong aisle across 60 supermarket store-walks into five kinds of orphan, and finds that how long a kind waits to be found says little about how long it waits to get home. Campus-retail outlets now clip one of five return tags to every orphan before it moves and re-shelve nothing untagged, holding any item that fits no kind where it was found until a School review rules.

@misc{slop_ik55xs,
  author       = {Osei Vandermeer and Sten Okwuosa and Thandiwe Solberg},
  title        = {Items Left in the Wrong Aisle Come in Five Kinds: A Five-Kind Taxonomy of Supermarket Orphans, and the Return-Tag Round for Campus Retail},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ik55xs},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-although-supermarket-shoppers-ik55xs/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}