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This is such a good idea. I know that everyone in the Western World is told that they eat too much but people need to be able to buy food and eat it. And if th
by badcppdev 3y ago
This is such a good idea. I know that everyone in the Western World is told that they eat too much but people need to be able to buy food and eat it. And if the same packaging this week has 90% of what it had last week then then consumers are going to suffer.
In the UK many people rely on Food banks and parents skip meals to feed their children. Cutting the amount of food in a package in a manner that is not even visible without carefully examination is a morally dubious practice.
Corporate profits are high. This is one of the reasons why.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoWell, you can (and should!) check the (mandatory) price/mass or price/volume, but of course there are very smart people being paid a lot to design the packaging so that it's sufficiently compelling for you to still put a higher value on the product...
- hedora 3y agoExpecting people to memorize the per-unit price of everything they buy and compare week to week is unrealistic. Also, at least in the US, the price/weight for the same type of item is often in different units. ($/oz for brand A; $/lb for brand B, etc)
- flir 3y agoSame in the UK, except 10g/100g/1000g so it's a bit easier to work out. Still an antipattern though.
- Symbiote 3y agoThe EU does have some rules about this [1], "The unit price shall refer to a quantity declared in accordance with national and Community provisions", but I've still seen similar products priced per 100g and a different brand priced per "item". [1] https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protection-law/unfair-commercial-practices-law/price-indication-directive_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...
- iteria 3y agoI don't think I've ever seen the price per unit unit not be the across brands of the same packaging type. Now this does get dicy for individual wrapped things, but outside of that everything uses the same unit in the same range. Even still, this is not a reasonable approach to tracking shrinkflation because I know I don't keep a running log of prices from week to week. I do sometimes notice package shrinking, but only because I buy weekly. If I wad a bulk buyer I'm not sure I'd notice as fast
- malfist 3y agoIt's even worse when the products you are trying to compare unit prices for when one of them shares a volume unit price and the other a weight unit price and another is in counts. These things should really be standardized.
- kvdveer 3y agoHere in the Netherlands, all units are metric (g, ml, g, kg). Liquid products are advertised by volume, but is they're watery (ie. most products), you can just assume litres are kilograms. Fatty or very sugary liquid products (e.g. cream, syrup) are the only things that can't easily be compared to kg price. I've only seen those advertised by volume, so they can still be compared to their peers.
- dustincoates 3y agoThis isn't my experience, so I went looking and found this: > Uniform Unit Pricing Regulations apply only when stores voluntarily provide unit pricing information. The unit of measure chosen must be consistent across like items within the category. So if a store offers unit pricing it must be consistent within a category. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laws-and-regulations/us-retail-pricing-laws-and-regulations https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laws-and-regulations/us-retail-...
- hedora 3y agoStrange. I've never seen a store in California (which they list as requiring such things) that uses consistent units of measure. Too bad there's not an obvious way to report violations.
- nebula8804 3y agoSounds like a great opportunity for an AR app that can compute and overlay differences in your field of view. It would be cool to run this on the Apple Goggles. (I am not ready to see people walking around wearing those things in real life).
- darrylb42 3y agoOr in Canada, BC. Things like meat can be priced in $/lb or $/100g in the same cabinet. Makes the mental math tricky and you can think something is cheap when it is not.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoWell, after a while I do roughly memorize it for the things I buy the most, don't you roughly remember the non-per-unit price if that is what you are looking at ? But that was not my point, the price per unit is to compare similar products with each other in the span of a minute or so. Because if they are ALL going up (or down), then there are clearly external factors to that price change. At worst it's the fault of the supermarket (and here remembering the rough price/unit comes handy, for comparisons in others), or an issue with a monopoly/cartel collusion, in which case hopefully consumer associations are going to start whistleblowing, leading to government handing out punishments.
- rhaway84773 3y agoThe price per unit in US groceries is ridiculous. You will literally have 3 packages of soda all of the same size listing the price per unit in completely different units. Some in ml, some in oz, some in pts.
- thfuran 3y agoWe don't even have standardization on the nutrition labels. The serving size is different for everything.
- cobbzilla 3y agoI had a bag of salad croutons that measured a serving as “2 Tablespoons” — are they expecting me to crush the croutons to measure a serving? Or just “eyeball” it to convert rectangular things into hemispherical things?
- hansvm 3y agoIt's worse than that. The serving size changes the resulting label. A lot of the high-protein breads have the same composition and are sliced slightly thicker to hit the 3.5g mark so they can round up to 4g per slice and appear to be more protein rich in composition.
- thfuran 3y agoI've seen oil with zero calories and over 1,500 servings per container.
- flaviut 3y agoI've made a userscript for this! https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/429539-unit-prices-on-kroger-com https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/429539-unit-prices-on-krog... Kroger doesn't publish unit prices on their websites, but they do publish quantities. They'll sometimes mix the units up (L, floz, see mapUnit() https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/429539-unit-prices-on-kroger-com/code https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/429539-unit-prices-on-krog...), but generally they're OK. The script will normalize everything to a specific metric unit & present a unit price on the page. Why stores have this horrible setup? Probably weaponized incompetence. Would be nice to have the FTC step in with some regulation.
- stilley2 3y agoBut as a consumer I don't want to have to check the price/mass in every product everything I shop, especially if I'm buying the same brand every week.
- badcppdev 3y agoAnd then I find myself checking the packaging of a frozen pizza (please don't judge me). There is a small plastic window on the front and I can tell that there is a pizza inside and from tipping it I can tell that the pizza is smaller than the box. The label says that the pizza is 500g (20 oz) which is totally useless to me because I can't remember if the box said 500, 550, or 600g when I bought it 3 months ago.
- oh_sigh 3y agoIt seems extremely burdensome to do that every time you go shopping. Also, it requires people to remember the unit price of the same product across multiple trips - whereas most people who do check the unit price do so in a side by side comparison with a different brand of the same type of product.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThis is a cynical move because, as the article mentions right at the top, this is just to apply pressure on suppliers before contracts renegotiations. Tesco in the Uk does not sort of stunt as well and for the same reasons. > In the UK many people rely on Food banks and parents skip meals to feed their children. A small minority, not 'many'...
- mholm 3y agoA small minority of the UK can still be hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. Don't underestimate volume just because the % is low.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoA small minority is a small minority whatever the absolute number and that is not 'many', which suggests something common and widespread. Also, using a food bank at least once and 'relying' on them are not the same thing.
- tyingq 3y agoIf this[1] is correct, one part stands out to me: "2.1 million people in the UK lived in household which had used a food bank in the previous 12 months, a rate of 3%. This includes 6% of children, 3% of working-age adults, and around 0% of pensioners." 6% of children feels not great, though other stats say the US is much worse, with 6+% of all households, not just children...and I've seen higher estimates. [1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9209 https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThat's a small minority that has used a food bank at least once in 12 months. The number of people 'relying' on them has to be even lower. We also can't discount that some people could have bought food but chose the food bank instead because it is free. My point was that writing 'many' suggests something common and widespread like if there were breadlines everywhere. It is not (but The Guardian likes to dramatise on this). In fact, I suspect that poorer people in the UK have a much higher chance of being obese than of being actually hungry.
- WalterBright 3y ago> Corporate profits are high. Inflation increases profits, too (but not in real dollars). > This is one of the reasons why. The reason why is inflation.
- malfist 3y ago> Inflation increases profits, too (but not in real dollars). [Citation needed] I find it hard to believe that corporate profits rise exactly proportional or less than the inflation rate.
- myrmidon 3y agoJust compare corporate profits before and after Covid, see e.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CA.PA/financials?p=CA.PA https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CA.PA/financials?p=CA.PA Not much of a difference. Certainly nothing that looks outright malicious.
- drawkward 3y agoThat's Carrefour, not the product manufacturers. In fact, the evidence you present is completely consistent with Carrefour's assertion that they have been doing what they can to absorb the price increases taken by the product manufacturers.
- WalterBright 3y agoProfit margins stay roughly the same for the last century.
- effingwewt 3y agoNo, the reason why is price gouging. Or as companies like to call it 'not leaving money on the table'. Prices have outpaced inflation. Everything has, except worker pay and minimum wage. Profits are record-breaking while laying off workers. CEO compensation and bonuses are insane. Housing prices are out of control. Gas is still $5/gallon where I'm at. It all boils down to one word: GREED.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI wish there was legislation in place that sets legal standard sizes; for one, it would allow for more uniform packaging, allowing reuse between brands and reducing trash. It would be more predictable box / pallet sizes, reducing transport costs. And it would give consumers more security, even with the mandatory price per liter / kilo notices which are often hard to read. One example of shrinkflation / cost fuckery here is cheese. We buy a kilo of it every time, but they've changed it so you get e.g. 920 grams. Looks the same size, but it's slightly different, thus hard to make comparisons. Still up 30% since before the Ukraine thing though.
- eru 3y agoYou can already shop at Aldi if you like things to come in standardised sizes. (I love Aldi! But I think such regulation would be pretty silly. But we already have such regulation in many parts of the world for many goods. Eg publ in the UK can't just sell you 500ml of beer, they need to give you a pint.)
- ochoseis 3y agoIf you regulate packaging sizes it’ll just cause unintended side effects, like weird fillers in your food.
- somsak2 3y agoAs sibling comment said, I think this is bound to cause unintended side-effects. I think it would be simpler to require per-unit pricing alongside overall cost, and regulate that amount. Nothing more frustrating than seeing a per ml or oz cost on one item and a per-count cost on one right next to it.