Nope Haul Challenge: Video 6

Today, I completed the NOPE HAUL challenge again. I walked into a major grocery store, filled an entire shopping cart with shelf-stable food—chips, cookies, boxed meals, sugary drinks, processed snacks—and left it behind, untouched, in the middle of the store. No checkout. No purchase. Just a cart overflowing with the kind of products that neuromarketing pushes into our lives, our homes, and our bodies.

This act, while disruptive, is not illegal in most countries. I didn't steal. I didn't damage property. I simply reversed the manipulation—responded to the engineered urge to overconsume by refusing to follow through. I let the cart speak for itself.

I'm fully aware that this creates extra work for store employees. I know that many of them are underpaid, overworked, and not responsible for the corporate strategies that shape the store's layout, pricing, and product placement. I don't take their labor lightly. But the inconvenience of restocking one cart is microscopic compared to the damage these stores inflict on humanity through relentless neuromarketing.

These retailers use behavioral science to bypass conscious decision-making. They exploit our attention, our impulses, our stress, our hunger. They design environments that make it easier to say yes than to say no. And the result? Billions of people living with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and shame. Families grieving loved ones lost to preventable illness. A planet drowning in food waste and packaging.

My NOPE HAUL is a protest. It's a message. It's a refusal to play along.

And I'll gladly stop.

I'll stop the moment these stores begin to take responsibility. The moment they start warning customers—clearly, visibly, honestly—about the consequences of overbuying. The moment they stop using scent, color, layout, and pricing to manipulate behavior and instead choose to empower it. The moment they treat shoppers as humans, not targets.

Until then, I'll keep filling carts with the products they push hardest. I'll keep leaving them behind. I'll keep reminding them that every purchase is a choice—and every cart is a battlefield.

Because silence is complicity. And I refuse to be silent.

Zoltán Bíró — Nope Haul Revolutionary | Debrecen, Hungary.