7 ms·

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation. Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation. Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it. Fun fact, that piece of legislation significantly contributed to Brexit propaganda, the campaign was based on "the EU wants to take away our pints/stones/pounds/whatnot".

zyberzero 2y ago
Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many different units, but for example brand A corn flakes comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is based on weight but I still need to do some math to figure out which one is cheaper :) This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.
- fbdab103 2y ago
  Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.
  - Arrath 2y ago
    I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the <unit> (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.
    - newzisforsukas 2y ago
      > strategically More like deceptively... If a person did that, I would consider the behavior antisocial.
      - bombcar 2y ago
        The one I’ve seen a couple of times recently is where the bigger item is more expensive per unit volume unit weight. This is sneaky as hell.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  "Serving" is the biggest vector for manipulation ever. They can make up whatever they want. I still remember looking at a small bag of potato chips that had 3 servings.
linsomniac 2y ago
Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery store, you're literally presented with a whole aisle of detergent, and even if you are as the section for "Tide Pods" there may be quite a few options (larger/smaller, "stain blaster", "fresh", whatever), you very quickly get a pretty good view of what the options are and their differences, plus prices and things like "on sale" cards. The shopping experience is absolutely inferior with Amazon for things for which there are many alike products. One could even imagine some sort of mega page for "slim network cables" where you'd select the standard and color and length and be presented with a few options. They try this with things like screws, though I can't believe they have one option for star drive 5/8" wood screws...
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong. I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap, including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific, Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should return one and only one result.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not a failure in search algorithm.
    - Arrath 2y ago
      For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations? When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.
tgma 2y ago
Nah. Just choose to buy the way you wish to. Vote with your money and don’t artificially restrict where there’s zero issues. Everything works out in the end. I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe. Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases? In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you. [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
  - tgma 2y ago
    Yes I am aware and I stand by my statement. Have you actually returned stuff to stores over there? I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.
    - timClicks 2y ago
      That's not capitalism, that's culture. In the USA, it's very common to return products because of a change of mind and/or complain. That isn't universal.
      - tgma 2y ago
        The fact that a retailer is willing to accept it despite not being forced to is absolutely the result of capitalism. If they don't, you buy from a competitor. This is not some hypothetical. People in the US routinely choose retailers based on their service experience. In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.
eru 2y ago
> Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it. That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price. No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover. Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.
- tomoyoirl 2y ago
  Amazon is kind enough to include unit pricing on many UI elements. It does seem to be less than consistent about the units, though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search page? Yes, and more :)
  - schrodinger 2y ago
    The point was that they're _not_ kind enough when you buy through Alex. The instant coffee you bought last month could have doubled but if you say "Alexa add [the coffee] to my cart ot just work… and if my anexcodes extrapolate at all, LOTS people use this feature.

zyberzero 2y ago

Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many different units, but for example brand A corn flakes comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is based on weight but I still need to do some math to figure out which one is cheaper :) This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.

fbdab103 2y ago
Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.
- Arrath 2y ago
  I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the <unit> (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.
  - newzisforsukas 2y ago
    > strategically More like deceptively... If a person did that, I would consider the behavior antisocial.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      The one I’ve seen a couple of times recently is where the bigger item is more expensive per unit volume unit weight. This is sneaky as hell.
rqtwteye 2y ago
"Serving" is the biggest vector for manipulation ever. They can make up whatever they want. I still remember looking at a small bag of potato chips that had 3 servings.

linsomniac 2y ago

Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery store, you're literally presented with a whole aisle of detergent, and even if you are as the section for "Tide Pods" there may be quite a few options (larger/smaller, "stain blaster", "fresh", whatever), you very quickly get a pretty good view of what the options are and their differences, plus prices and things like "on sale" cards. The shopping experience is absolutely inferior with Amazon for things for which there are many alike products. One could even imagine some sort of mega page for "slim network cables" where you'd select the standard and color and length and be presented with a few options. They try this with things like screws, though I can't believe they have one option for star drive 5/8" wood screws...

ryandrake 2y ago
Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong. I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap, including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific, Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should return one and only one result.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not a failure in search algorithm.
  - Arrath 2y ago
    For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations? When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.

tgma 2y ago

Nah. Just choose to buy the way you wish to. Vote with your money and don’t artificially restrict where there’s zero issues. Everything works out in the end. I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.

mschuster91 2y ago
> The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe. Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases? In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you. [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
- tgma 2y ago
  Yes I am aware and I stand by my statement. Have you actually returned stuff to stores over there? I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.
  - timClicks 2y ago
    That's not capitalism, that's culture. In the USA, it's very common to return products because of a change of mind and/or complain. That isn't universal.
    - tgma 2y ago
      The fact that a retailer is willing to accept it despite not being forced to is absolutely the result of capitalism. If they don't, you buy from a competitor. This is not some hypothetical. People in the US routinely choose retailers based on their service experience. In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.

eru 2y ago

> Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it. That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price. No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover. Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.

tomoyoirl 2y ago
Amazon is kind enough to include unit pricing on many UI elements. It does seem to be less than consistent about the units, though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search page? Yes, and more :)
- schrodinger 2y ago
  The point was that they're _not_ kind enough when you buy through Alex. The instant coffee you bought last month could have doubled but if you say "Alexa add [the coffee] to my cart ot just work… and if my anexcodes extrapolate at all, LOTS people use this feature.