7 ms·

The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consume

The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine. How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths

mlsu 2y ago
It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online. I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement. Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to avoid having to think of strategies to outsmart. This too feels terrible and exhausting in a different way.
- pmontra 2y ago
  > It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.
  - xp84 2y ago
    The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like: #1: $0.37 / ounce #2: $6.50 / pound or even: #3: $1.82 / each (a price per item) This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but it stretches my belief that they have the time to get it so wrong intentionally.
    - regularfry 2y ago
      It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion. Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.
      - pmontra 2y ago
        I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold. It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol is really sold by the liters there. Maybe somebody from the UK could confirm or refute the tale. Anyway it's probably way more than one pound per liter now.
        frameset 2y ago
        Petrol is around £1.44 a litre at the moment, varying a bit geographically.
        iam-TJ 2y ago
        The change-over was actually driven by the technology at the time - namely the outdoor road-facing price advertising panels, as well as many of the pump displays. Simply - they were only designed to show 2 numbers so when the price-per-gallon exceeded 99 pence many had to stick a static "1" in front, and many point-of-sale terminals and cash registers couldn't handle it. Since there are ~4.5 litres in a British gallon displaying pence-per-litre brought the displayed prices back to 2 digits and allowed for a gradual transition to 3 and 4 digit displays. And yes, at the time the switch from pence-per-gallon to pence-per-litre occurred some retailers did take advantage to 'add some profit margin' but it wasn't universal.
        pjc50 2y ago
        It is, and everything is required to be sold in metric units. Except for things like pipe fittings and screw sizes, but even those have to show the metric somewhere. There's an effort to switch car efficiency from mpg (higher is better) to "l/100km" (smaller is better), because the latter has more intuitive scaling as well as being properly metric. There were definitely people complaining about the price hike when the currency changed, but that was back in 1971 so it's only boomers who'll bring it up.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    but even with the label you don't know if the cheaper one is full of sugar or is mostly water etc... there's no escape.
  - dwighttk 2y ago
    At my store they are free to choose their unit and they strive for unit heterogeneity within a specific product you might want to compare
    - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
      That's a good store. My store has a few different brands of coconut milk. Some of the unit prices are per pound, while others are per quart. I make the approximation that coconut milk has the same density as water, which is two pounds per quart. The unit prices are all odd three digits numbers. It's a pain. You could have one person who works in an office somewhere who's responsible for itemizing inventory for the whole grocery chain. They could solve this problem (maybe automatically!) with a spreadsheet. They could also solve the problem of tomatillos not being registered in the self-checkout catalog. But what is that person's salary paying for in the company's eyes? To be fair, maybe the real explanation is "lots of stuff, shit happens." And it's only a factor of two (for watery goods, anyway).
  - vkou 2y ago
    Where I live, labels get these price per amount labels... But they don't keep the denominator consistent, even across the same category of product. So I get to compare a price/oz, versus a price/lb versus a price/serving and all the while, I contemplate why nobody's interested in burning the whole store down.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    They have to do that in the UK too, but unfortunately the law doesn't seem to standardise the unit for these comparison values(or it does and is ignored). If you have two packs of coke cans next to each other, and one gives you a price per 100ml, and the other per can, it doesn't help that much(yes you could multiply the value per 100ml by around 3x, but at a glance the difference isn't obvious).
- 8A51C 2y ago
  My mum has told me about her shopping habits in the 70s, she would have a list of everything they needed, she would walk around the first shop writing all the prices down. She would walk around the second shop buying the items that were cheaper, then return to the first shop to buy what was cheaper there.
- naravara 2y ago
  I was excited about the brief wave of startup grocery stores that were selling zero/minimally packaged staple goods, like “The Rounds.” But it seems like they’re just not able to hit a level of scale to where they can be price competitive with the sneaky dark patterned stores. So I guess I’m sticking to Aldi.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  We will all end up having to walk around with an AI shopping assistant that can do all these pricing calculations and comparisons for us.- (Other than biases, them AI's being "mindless" might be an advantage here ...) PS. Until we go so so multimodal that they start to be influenced by packaging size, bright colors, rounding, and big breasts.- PSS. Heh. Perhaps the ultimate Turing test is when them AI's start to be influenced by marketing, and shady practices thereof.-
  - rlupi 2y ago
    If a company makes something like Meta's ray-ban smart glasses but with the one function of being an AI shopping assistant (preferably offline), it would instantly make the case for why AI is good for the world. I think it could quickly become an unicorn startup, if it can deliver. The company would have to make a compelling case of not selling itself to brands, and I am not sure such a company exists. Maybe we need an open source project, but it will be constant battle as with ad blockers. The base features we need are: 1) price comparison: scan all unit prices of products on the shelves, compare and covert, then use AR to superimpose the comparison charts/prices. 2) filter by feature: e.g. food restrictions (allergy, halal, etc.), flavors, etc. 3) ad block: for the real world. Block misleading prices (3 for the price of 2, etc.), to avoid being primed with biased triggers in our choices.
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      What you describe would be a game changer ... An AR, AI assistant with marketing and advertising IRL-blocking.-
Phiwise_ 2y ago
If by "these companies" you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can't trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon's bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren't pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their "essential goods" themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they've arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.
rkachowski 2y ago
It's absurd that you have to become a being of continuous price comparison in order to be considered conscious. This is predatory behaviour loaded with decades of psychological research around manipulation strategies to increase purchases (e.g. price anchoring, physical positioning on shelves, store layout). These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There's a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it's more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of "nearly all the consumers"
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Behold: The Market doing Market shit.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  PS: Even the conscious consumers loose, as they spend a ton of time at minimum wage scrolling prices for goods and services. Basically, yes, you get pay less, but for that you have to work 24/7 in the mine-defusing sweatshop.
  - salad-tycoon 2y ago
    Feels like winning to me. Feeds into my hunter-gatherer complex and every cent I keep from them gives me great satisfaction. Though, you are right, it does get old but then my defiant and vengeful nature kicks me right back into. I know it doesn’t matter to them, it matters to me and it’s a win and winners keep winning, right?
    - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
      Train an AI on it? Resell an market conscious agent and beat the opponent with artificial consumer endurance? Defect in all games played?
Gravityloss 2y ago
If you look at the list of top online stores after Amazon, many are brands with also physical stores. One would assume they are less shammy. I know if I go to a regular supermarket here, great effort has been spent by the buyers and the organization to ensure that everything is actually of decent quality. Even the cheapest alternatives. That cost of course I then have to pay in the price of the products. I prefer not to buy things from unknown sellers which I can get from known sources. Sometimes you need something special like a car spare part that has local markup of 300% so then online is worth the risk (not safety critical parts). I just don't understand the situation where a person decides to buy a regular product from an unknown seller, especially from a system that incentivizes something that is not in the interest of the buyer.
Aeolun 2y ago
Probably stuck in a local optimum.
schaefer 2y ago
On the other hand, hearing you refer to the people you’ve met as “consumers” before criticizing them sounds pretty dehumanizing. It leaves me wondering if you were able to connect with them on a personal level at all, or if perhaps you were also “barely conscious” during these interactions.
vondur 2y ago
Yeah, but I don't know anyone that will just blindly order stuff from Amazon using Alexa like this. They all know that they have no idea what item will be shipped or what price they may be charged. So I'd argue that they are leaving money on the table from potential sales.

mlsu 2y ago

It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online. I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement. Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to avoid having to think of strategies to outsmart. This too feels terrible and exhausting in a different way.

pmontra 2y ago
> It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.
- xp84 2y ago
  The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like: #1: $0.37 / ounce #2: $6.50 / pound or even: #3: $1.82 / each (a price per item) This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but it stretches my belief that they have the time to get it so wrong intentionally.
  - regularfry 2y ago
    It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion. Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.
    - pmontra 2y ago
      I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold. It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol is really sold by the liters there. Maybe somebody from the UK could confirm or refute the tale. Anyway it's probably way more than one pound per liter now.
      - frameset 2y ago
        Petrol is around £1.44 a litre at the moment, varying a bit geographically.
      - iam-TJ 2y ago
        The change-over was actually driven by the technology at the time - namely the outdoor road-facing price advertising panels, as well as many of the pump displays. Simply - they were only designed to show 2 numbers so when the price-per-gallon exceeded 99 pence many had to stick a static "1" in front, and many point-of-sale terminals and cash registers couldn't handle it. Since there are ~4.5 litres in a British gallon displaying pence-per-litre brought the displayed prices back to 2 digits and allowed for a gradual transition to 3 and 4 digit displays. And yes, at the time the switch from pence-per-gallon to pence-per-litre occurred some retailers did take advantage to 'add some profit margin' but it wasn't universal.
      - pjc50 2y ago
        It is, and everything is required to be sold in metric units. Except for things like pipe fittings and screw sizes, but even those have to show the metric somewhere. There's an effort to switch car efficiency from mpg (higher is better) to "l/100km" (smaller is better), because the latter has more intuitive scaling as well as being properly metric. There were definitely people complaining about the price hike when the currency changed, but that was back in 1971 so it's only boomers who'll bring it up.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  but even with the label you don't know if the cheaper one is full of sugar or is mostly water etc... there's no escape.
- dwighttk 2y ago
  At my store they are free to choose their unit and they strive for unit heterogeneity within a specific product you might want to compare
  - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    That's a good store. My store has a few different brands of coconut milk. Some of the unit prices are per pound, while others are per quart. I make the approximation that coconut milk has the same density as water, which is two pounds per quart. The unit prices are all odd three digits numbers. It's a pain. You could have one person who works in an office somewhere who's responsible for itemizing inventory for the whole grocery chain. They could solve this problem (maybe automatically!) with a spreadsheet. They could also solve the problem of tomatillos not being registered in the self-checkout catalog. But what is that person's salary paying for in the company's eyes? To be fair, maybe the real explanation is "lots of stuff, shit happens." And it's only a factor of two (for watery goods, anyway).
- vkou 2y ago
  Where I live, labels get these price per amount labels... But they don't keep the denominator consistent, even across the same category of product. So I get to compare a price/oz, versus a price/lb versus a price/serving and all the while, I contemplate why nobody's interested in burning the whole store down.
- gambiting 2y ago
  They have to do that in the UK too, but unfortunately the law doesn't seem to standardise the unit for these comparison values(or it does and is ignored). If you have two packs of coke cans next to each other, and one gives you a price per 100ml, and the other per can, it doesn't help that much(yes you could multiply the value per 100ml by around 3x, but at a glance the difference isn't obvious).
8A51C 2y ago
My mum has told me about her shopping habits in the 70s, she would have a list of everything they needed, she would walk around the first shop writing all the prices down. She would walk around the second shop buying the items that were cheaper, then return to the first shop to buy what was cheaper there.
naravara 2y ago
I was excited about the brief wave of startup grocery stores that were selling zero/minimally packaged staple goods, like “The Rounds.” But it seems like they’re just not able to hit a level of scale to where they can be price competitive with the sneaky dark patterned stores. So I guess I’m sticking to Aldi.
Bluestein 2y ago
We will all end up having to walk around with an AI shopping assistant that can do all these pricing calculations and comparisons for us.- (Other than biases, them AI's being "mindless" might be an advantage here ...) PS. Until we go so so multimodal that they start to be influenced by packaging size, bright colors, rounding, and big breasts.- PSS. Heh. Perhaps the ultimate Turing test is when them AI's start to be influenced by marketing, and shady practices thereof.-
- rlupi 2y ago
  If a company makes something like Meta's ray-ban smart glasses but with the one function of being an AI shopping assistant (preferably offline), it would instantly make the case for why AI is good for the world. I think it could quickly become an unicorn startup, if it can deliver. The company would have to make a compelling case of not selling itself to brands, and I am not sure such a company exists. Maybe we need an open source project, but it will be constant battle as with ad blockers. The base features we need are: 1) price comparison: scan all unit prices of products on the shelves, compare and covert, then use AR to superimpose the comparison charts/prices. 2) filter by feature: e.g. food restrictions (allergy, halal, etc.), flavors, etc. 3) ad block: for the real world. Block misleading prices (3 for the price of 2, etc.), to avoid being primed with biased triggers in our choices.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    What you describe would be a game changer ... An AR, AI assistant with marketing and advertising IRL-blocking.-

Phiwise_ 2y ago

If by "these companies" you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can't trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon's bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren't pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their "essential goods" themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they've arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.

rkachowski 2y ago

It's absurd that you have to become a being of continuous price comparison in order to be considered conscious. This is predatory behaviour loaded with decades of psychological research around manipulation strategies to increase purchases (e.g. price anchoring, physical positioning on shelves, store layout). These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There's a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it's more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of "nearly all the consumers"

forgetfreeman 2y ago
Behold: The Market doing Market shit.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
PS: Even the conscious consumers loose, as they spend a ton of time at minimum wage scrolling prices for goods and services. Basically, yes, you get pay less, but for that you have to work 24/7 in the mine-defusing sweatshop.
- salad-tycoon 2y ago
  Feels like winning to me. Feeds into my hunter-gatherer complex and every cent I keep from them gives me great satisfaction. Though, you are right, it does get old but then my defiant and vengeful nature kicks me right back into. I know it doesn’t matter to them, it matters to me and it’s a win and winners keep winning, right?
  - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    Train an AI on it? Resell an market conscious agent and beat the opponent with artificial consumer endurance? Defect in all games played?

Gravityloss 2y ago

If you look at the list of top online stores after Amazon, many are brands with also physical stores. One would assume they are less shammy. I know if I go to a regular supermarket here, great effort has been spent by the buyers and the organization to ensure that everything is actually of decent quality. Even the cheapest alternatives. That cost of course I then have to pay in the price of the products. I prefer not to buy things from unknown sellers which I can get from known sources. Sometimes you need something special like a car spare part that has local markup of 300% so then online is worth the risk (not safety critical parts). I just don't understand the situation where a person decides to buy a regular product from an unknown seller, especially from a system that incentivizes something that is not in the interest of the buyer.

Aeolun 2y ago

Probably stuck in a local optimum.

schaefer 2y ago

On the other hand, hearing you refer to the people you’ve met as “consumers” before criticizing them sounds pretty dehumanizing. It leaves me wondering if you were able to connect with them on a personal level at all, or if perhaps you were also “barely conscious” during these interactions.

vondur 2y ago

Yeah, but I don't know anyone that will just blindly order stuff from Amazon using Alexa like this. They all know that they have no idea what item will be shipped or what price they may be charged. So I'd argue that they are leaving money on the table from potential sales.