It’s quite a challenge to remain optimistic in the present climate, but at least one retailer is working on making shoppers feel better at a highly subconscious level.

In Holland, grocery chain Plus has been working with Philips, the electronics and lighting company, to create store environments that will adapt to the way people feel at different points during the day.

At this juncture, you may feel inclined to imagine that allowing for endless days when traders’ screens turn red, this would mean pretty gloomy retail interiors, because what reason might there be to feel good? But even given this state of affairs, there are points during the 16 hours that people tend to be awake for when they are more or less alert and responsive to different kinds of stimuli.

For those who find getting out of bed a bit of a chore, for example, it will come as little compensation to know that once you do manage to surface, you will be at your most active – speaking generally. Equally, post-lunch torpor affects everyone and if you really want to see how, try attending a conference where the speaker has been allocated the “graveyard slot”, sometime around 2.30 in the afternoon; almost everybody is fighting to stay awake.

Plus’s solution to this is to vary the intensity of light that shoppers will encounter when they come into a store. This means that early in the morning, the level of lighting intensity will be lower than in the early afternoon, all in the name of keeping consumers sufficiently alert to notice what is on offer and make a purchasing decision.

This kind of mood-altering subliminal stuff might at first seem a little underhand, but this would be unfair. This is merely an attempt to make shoppers more receptive to merchandise, increasing the chances that they will respond to the various in-store appeals that are made.

As such, it is little more than another form of point-of-sale material – something that will boost the chances of a retailer selling a few more items. It might just also be possible that it would go some way towards lifting spirits at the several points during the day when things seem a tad on the mundane side.

You have to ask whether this particular strategy might have wider applications. Would the injection of a little “happy light” cause traders to push the purchase button on the many retail stocks that look massively oversold at present?