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In the EU, shops are required to display the price per <appropiate round value>, i. e. all coffees have a (usually smaller, but readable) Euro/500g price. Ther
by IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
In the EU, shops are required to display the price per <appropiate round value>, i. e. all coffees have a (usually smaller, but readable) Euro/500g price.
There used to be an even more drastic law proscribing certain sizes and disallowing all others. Flour would only be available in 500g and 1kg bags, for example. They got rid of it, possibly because they got sick of people making fun of EU regulations (that's what happened with the famous banana ratings)
- breakbread 7y ago>In the EU, shops are required to display the price per <appropiate round value>, i. e. all coffees have a (usually smaller, but readable) Euro/500g price. Grocery stores in the US do this, but it's not something you necessarily see in food service shops.
- r00fus 7y agoIt's not consistent. Sometimes they $/lb sometimes they price $/item - for the same class of item. It's as often design to mislead and prevent comparison as it is to inform you that "store brand is definitely cheaper than name brand". Since none of it is mandated, they do only what benefits their bottom line or they are publicly pressured to.
- benibela 7y agoThey do that in the EU/Germany, too €/item, €/100g, €/1kg are all common
- panpanna 7y agoIn 99% this is _not_ a EU thing. Maybe some German law?? Or just common practice in Germany? Edit: I think I confused your response with parent. I understand price/kg is a thing although I didn't knew it was mandated by law. What I don't understand is being forced to use some odd unit like price per 500g.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoSame in Hungary. Everything has price / kg or litre shown next to the item’s price.
- icebraining 7y agoI read panpanna's post as saying that it's not common to have different units, not that there's no price per unit value next to labels.
- Moru 7y agoIt's at least law in Sweden since a while.
- benibela 7y agoI do not remember ever seeing price per 500g
- supermatt 7y agoIts unit price as required by directive 98/6/EC. A unit is how the product is customarily sold (singly) in the member state. So for items typically sold as 500g in Germany, all items of that type in Germany would be labelled with 500g as the unit size for comparison. That same product may typically be sold in the UK as 1kg, so in the UK they would use 1kg.
- 7y ago
- baroffoos 7y agoAt least comparing 100g to 1kg is trivial.
- divbyzer0 7y agoIt may be trivial, but it can be equally trivial for a manufacturer to to use misleading fonts or units to cause sufficient confusion to increase sales by a small margin. Every label under every product I see has the price per kg preventing such deception.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago> Grocery stores in the US do this, but it's not something you necessarily see in food service shops. They do an absolute shit job of it, because there are no standards or regulations. Most times I see this, similar items next to each other on the shelf are using different "standard" units making comparison impossible (e.g. price per ounce vs. price per piece). I've even seen two sizes of the same brand/product use different "standard" units on the grocery store price label.
- makosdv 7y agoLuckily, my local Publix that I shop at does it quite well.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoYou're being way over dramatic. 99% of the time the unit makes sense and is the same for comparable products.
- uoaei 7y agoThat may be your experience based on what you shop for and where you do it. America is way behind Europe on this. 99% of the time I go to Safeway, I have to bring out my calculator because the reference volume/weight is different from the other items on the same shelf.
- bpodgursky 7y agoSafeway and other grocery chains all list price per ounce next to the price.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- j_jochem 7y agoWhen I want to buy cherry tomatoes in German REWE, usually half the varieties have their unit price listed in €/100g, while the rest is in €/1kg. While metric does make converting in your head easy, I bet this still throws off a lot of the non-mathematical people and is done very much intentionally.
- tialaramex 7y agoIs coffee really per 500g? That's a weird quantity. I'd expect kilo or 100g. The UK used to require bread to be 400g or multiples (so a regular sized loaf of bread is 800g) but it eventually got rid of that rule. Obviously years ago (this rule was hundreds of years old) it will have been some amount in an obsolete unit rather than grams, but once metrication happened the bakers picked 400g as the replacement size. I'm told it got rid of this law a few years back, but certainly last time I bought a loaf of bread it was still 800 grams.
- freeflight 7y ago500g coffee packs are pretty much the regular size in Germany too, at least for pre-ground [0]. Packs with whole roasted beans are usually on the bigger end. [0] https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/354801_-kroenung-kaffee-gemahlen-500-g-jacobs.html https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/354801_...
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoBread used to always be 1lb (454g) and 2lb (908g) loaves. They shrank a little with the move to metric. :)
- tialaramex 7y ago"used to be" prior to World War 2. The loaves shrank (and ingredient quality worsened) as part of rationing. After the war better ingredients became available but loaves remained 14oz, which is slightly less than 400g. Conveniently 14oz is not enough under 400g to count as "undersize" in the regulations, so generously filled 14oz tins produced compliant 400g batches when Britain went metric.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoHmm, never knew that. :) I knew of the Bread Act that set it 1lb/2lb, and the Middle Ages origins that worked "backwards" - when the price of the loaf was fixed and the weight of the loaf was varied as the price of wheat changed.
- Scoundreller 7y agoEven if the price per unit didn’t change, when the pack size gets smaller, there’s more packaging per litre/kg. Although packaging could be thinner, a lot of packaging is to protect from external impact/environment, and remains just as thick, but the surface area to volume ratio has increased. If I need 3L, it’s annoying to buy 4x 750 instead of 3x 1L like I could in the past. But the opposite can be true too: a 12 pack of soap may be 12 boxes inside a box...
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI didn't know there was such regulation, and now I wish we could get it back. Not a month goes by without me or my wife noticing another product in the supermarket that lost a few percent of its mass while retaining its price.
- freeflight 7y agoSadly it doesn't translate very well to every kind of grocery item. Kitchen paper towels and toilet paper can still give you a pretty good math exercise to figure out what's more affordable.
- Aengeuad 7y agoMy local supermarket sells their budget fruit brands (which are actually owned/leased from the supermarket itself) as a pack with no actual weight measurement given, so the price is per apple. Every other brand lists their weight and prices are given per 100g, so if you actually want to figure out what is cheaper you need to go weigh the budget brand on the scales and then do the maths yourself!
- Scoundreller 7y agoAnd when I think about it, those are 2 items I’d like to buy by the kilogram.
- DoingIsLearning 7y agoFor accuracy sake, the banana curveness ratings were a lie created by Rupert Murdoch's tabloids. This was flamboyantly repeated and amplified by the current UK Prime Minister who was then 'journalist' Boris Johnson. There is quite literally an archive in the European Comission containing, clarifications regarding lies and misrepresentation of facts (the large majority of which created by UK newspapers). https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/curved-bananas/ https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/curved-bananas/