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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 ti

• 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.
    • jjeaff 2y ago
      it has to be intentional. almost any two products that you might want to compare are always using different units. haagan Daaz pints are always shown with different units than the larger haagan daaz.
    • asfodelsu 2y ago
      In many places in Europe: Normal price per item big letters, price per Kg small letters. Problem solved
      • rickdeckard 2y ago
        Comparable unit-pricing: A mandate brought to you by the European Union. You know, this allegedly evil entity that always hassles with the free market and annoys global companies. /s
        • cromulent 2y ago
          Whilst I am waiting for my number in a chemist, I kill time by finding the highest price per litre. It's normally some anti-aging cream at well over €1000 / l.
        • animuchan 2y ago
          This is not just EU, in our here Middle Eastern country there's the same law. (And also mandatory "high sugar" warning stickers on unhealthy stuff.) Customer-friendly regulation sure feels nice.
        • rvnx 2y ago
          The same with this "metric system"
        • marcosdumay 2y ago
          > and annoys global companies Lol... Meta is doing a huge campaign here in Brazil about how they won't provide us their AI services because they are annoyed by that entity. It has been quite a help to the government popularity.
          • rickdeckard 2y ago
            In Europe Apple follows the same strategy, but in a more subtle way than a full campaign. And sadly, it seems they found some audience...
      • deleted 2y ago
    • nerdponx 2y ago
      When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to greed.
      • gregw2 2y ago
        Nice twist on the incompetence version of Hanlon's razor... does it have a name? "Nerdponx's razor" will have a hard time catching on... EDIT: I see esmifra on Reddit said this six years ago... but not sure "esmifra's razor" would catch on either. https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/8itqf5/comment/dyuvzbp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/8itqf5/comment/d... And I see there is a similar but less catchily-worded concept, "Hubbard's corollary" from 2020 mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Hanlon's razor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
        • nerdponx 2y ago
          I actually thought I made it up, and almost called it "Nerdponx's Razor", but I thought it would be arrogant to name it after myself. Hubbard can take the credit!
    • Damogran6 2y ago
      Oh, they have plenty of time to do it. We have created lots of MBAs...people who want to take advantage of their education, and to do so they want to squeeze a little more profit. And they're bored. And they need to stand out from their coworkers. Therefore 'price per net weight' becomes a thing. And Surge pricing. (Peanutbutter M&Ms are an egregious example...the share bag price varies 20% depending on the calendar, as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages...which is a choice and means a family of 4 needs to buy two of them now to make a meal.)
      • AceyMan 2y ago
        Well, Peanutbutter M&Ms are sacred manna, so they are a bad example. At my Ralph's (=Kroger), all the large bags dissappear minutes after getting loaded into the shelf.
      • wannacboatmovie 2y ago
        > as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages Your grievance reminds me of this classic phone call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RNb3tt0LM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RNb3tt0LM
      • davidf18 2y ago
        [dead]
  • 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.-