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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

This is especially annoying when you realize that ever brand is different. There will be seven different brands of coffee in identically-sized bags, yet one may have 5.7oz of coffee and another will be 12.8oz.

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Is it possible they are trying to sell for the same price but with wildly varying costs of each varietal of coffee? I.E. they want to sell a bag for 15 bucks across the board but some beans cost them far more than others to source?

It still seems purely disingenuous to package them deceptively to appear to be the same quantity.

Up to some value of volumeDelta * productCount it actually makes sense to use the same container due to sourcing/manufacturing cost from the variance so I wouldn't say purely disingenuous, there is real reasoning behind some of it... it's just marketing gets in the way of when you should actually add that second container size i.e. it's costing you more to always use the bigger container but the marketing department says the increase in sales due to confusion outweighs it.

So then why not just keep putting the same amount of coffee in the can?

It's on us though. They're lying to us to get our money, our labor, our consent. We let them.

Why?

Because it pays, and for some reason not many people have the guts to say marketing is rotten to the core, and advertising is cancer on the society. Maybe because the market encourages it structurally. Lying costs little and yields good profits, so acting immorally gives competitive advantage.

Because demand curves don't work like that unless you have a highly inelastic good. With normal goods keeping quantity constant as price changes puts you on a suboptimal point on the demand curve. Coffee's price certainly hasn't been inelastic and changing can size at every spike would have netted you decent production cost increases instead of savings: http://www.aboutinflation.com/_/rsrc/1368022029715/coffee-vs...

The varying of quantities in the same sized container is not the problem and is certainly not illogical. The problem is when we allow marketing departments to lie/cheat/fool the product onto a different portion of the demand curve instead of letting the $/amount naturally flow back when price decreases or when it makes sense to switch to cheaper containers.

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