Major grocery shops routinely swap their profitable items with the popular items. They do this to stop the customer going into auto-pilot and instead forcing them into actually looking for what they want. So no, shoppers finding their product does not pay for itself.

Little bit of a tangent, but as a customer I am not "delighted" when I find a product quickly and easily; I am merely not frustrated. Finding what I'm looking for is the baseline experience, having to search for what I'm looking for makes me annoyed and less likely to buy anything other than what I need so I can just get out of there.

In my experience, any product or service advertising itself as "delighting" customers actually means that they're overall making the baseline experience worse, and their product/service is just reducing the frustration they're introducing.

It depends on the segment. All of the hardware stores near me have websites that list the exact aisle and bay product is in. They've seemed to figure out it's a competitive disadvantage to make their customers wander.

It's not entirely clear to me if grocers and other retail will end up taking the same route. Grocery service is increasingly move to hands-off (pickup or delivery) and other segments seem to be moving heavily on-line (including gig-delivery). It seems like they'll continue to punish foot traffic while encouraging customers to do online or hands-off buying.

Finding a product quickly is actually the opposite of what a store owner would want, because it means you are spending less time on looking at the other products.

Yes I hate that attitude too.

This is exactly why we can't have nice things. There has been a lot of study in how to manipulate shoppers to get them to buy more things in your shops, from playing in-store music that is slower so they walk slower, to putting expensive stuff at eye-level, to putting common things at the back of the shop so you have to walk past everything else to get to them