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Comment by IfOnlyYouKnew | Hacker News Reader

In the EU, shops are required to display the price per <appropiate round value>, i. e. all coffees have a (usually smaller, but readable) Euro/500g price.

There used to be an even more drastic law proscribing certain sizes and disallowing all others. Flour would only be available in 500g and 1kg bags, for example. They got rid of it, possibly because they got sick of people making fun of EU regulations (that's what happened with the famous banana ratings)

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>In the EU, shops are required to display the price per <appropiate round value>, i. e. all coffees have a (usually smaller, but readable) Euro/500g price.

Grocery stores in the US do this, but it's not something you necessarily see in food service shops.

> Grocery stores in the US do this, but it's not something you necessarily see in food service shops.

They do an absolute shit job of it, because there are no standards or regulations. Most times I see this, similar items next to each other on the shelf are using different "standard" units making comparison impossible (e.g. price per ounce vs. price per piece). I've even seen two sizes of the same brand/product use different "standard" units on the grocery store price label.

Safeway does this on the west coast. Annoying, not to mention using English/American units that are difficult to convert (how many ounces in a gallon?).

Fluid ounces, you mean. 128. Not a fan of base 2, I take it.

Luckily, my local Publix that I shop at does it quite well.

You're being way over dramatic. 99% of the time the unit makes sense and is the same for comparable products.

That may be your experience based on what you shop for and where you do it.

America is way behind Europe on this. 99% of the time I go to Safeway, I have to bring out my calculator because the reference volume/weight is different from the other items on the same shelf.

When I want to buy cherry tomatoes in German REWE, usually half the varieties have their unit price listed in €/100g, while the rest is in €/1kg. While metric does make converting in your head easy, I bet this still throws off a lot of the non-mathematical people and is done very much intentionally.

Safeway and other grocery chains all list price per ounce next to the price.

Interesting, yeah the Safeways I've been to have all had price per ounce pretty consistently.

What is a bit irritating is having to recalculate when items are discounted.

They usually include the price per for the discounted tag also. Only when it’s a buy x get y free is it hard.

Even with in the exact same product but different sizes I seem them use different units to make to hard to figure out which size provides the best value

That seems odd to me. Wouldn’t the store want you to purchase the bigger product, and thus spend more money?

You’d think it would be in their interest to display the per-unit price comparison, to emphasise where a bigger package is better value.

Only if the bigger product is actually the better value, that is not always the case.

I know of several products that the Mid Size packaging has the best Per Unit value.

And several where they are the EXACT same price per unit, so they want to push you to the bigger one hoping you will waste most of it.

Most stores near me make the lettering very small... if you don't have near perfect vision good luck reading the price per ounce.

It's not consistent. Sometimes they $/lb sometimes they price $/item - for the same class of item.

It's as often design to mislead and prevent comparison as it is to inform you that "store brand is definitely cheaper than name brand".

Since none of it is mandated, they do only what benefits their bottom line or they are publicly pressured to.

They do that in the EU/Germany, too

€/item, €/100g, €/1kg are all common

In 99% this is _not_ a EU thing.

Maybe some German law?? Or just common practice in Germany?

Edit: I think I confused your response with parent. I understand price/kg is a thing although I didn't knew it was mandated by law. What I don't understand is being forced to use some odd unit like price per 500g.

I do not remember ever seeing price per 500g

Yep, every item I see is price per kg. I can't think of exceptions.

In the UK it is typically either per 100g or per kg. Or per litre or per unit. Depends on the category of product.

Its unit price as required by directive 98/6/EC.

A unit is how the product is customarily sold (singly) in the member state.

So for items typically sold as 500g in Germany, all items of that type in Germany would be labelled with 500g as the unit size for comparison. That same product may typically be sold in the UK as 1kg, so in the UK they would use 1kg.

Are we talking about stuff that can vary in size but isn't weighted? Like kiwi's or cucumbers have a fixed price each while apples or bananas have a kg price. But I don't remember seeing processed food without a kg price.

The only time I remember having difficulty comparing was different formats of toilet paper when our usual brand was out of stock... #rolls × #sheets / pack price was a bit to much for me to do in my head. Yeah, I'm not really complaining.

Same in Hungary. Everything has price / kg or litre shown next to the item’s price.

I read panpanna's post as saying that it's not common to have different units, not that there's no price per unit value next to labels.

It's at least law in Sweden since a while.

At least comparing 100g to 1kg is trivial.

It may be trivial, but it can be equally trivial for a manufacturer to to use misleading fonts or units to cause sufficient confusion to increase sales by a small margin. Every label under every product I see has the price per kg preventing such deception.

For accuracy sake, the banana curveness ratings were a lie created by Rupert Murdoch's tabloids.

This was flamboyantly repeated and amplified by the current UK Prime Minister who was then 'journalist' Boris Johnson.

There is quite literally an archive in the European Comission containing, clarifications regarding lies and misrepresentation of facts (the large majority of which created by UK newspapers).

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/curved-bananas/

Even if the price per unit didn’t change, when the pack size gets smaller, there’s more packaging per litre/kg.

Although packaging could be thinner, a lot of packaging is to protect from external impact/environment, and remains just as thick, but the surface area to volume ratio has increased.

If I need 3L, it’s annoying to buy 4x 750 instead of 3x 1L like I could in the past.

But the opposite can be true too: a 12 pack of soap may be 12 boxes inside a box...

Is coffee really per 500g? That's a weird quantity. I'd expect kilo or 100g.

The UK used to require bread to be 400g or multiples (so a regular sized loaf of bread is 800g) but it eventually got rid of that rule. Obviously years ago (this rule was hundreds of years old) it will have been some amount in an obsolete unit rather than grams, but once metrication happened the bakers picked 400g as the replacement size. I'm told it got rid of this law a few years back, but certainly last time I bought a loaf of bread it was still 800 grams.

Bread used to always be 1lb (454g) and 2lb (908g) loaves. They shrank a little with the move to metric. :)

"used to be" prior to World War 2. The loaves shrank (and ingredient quality worsened) as part of rationing. After the war better ingredients became available but loaves remained 14oz, which is slightly less than 400g. Conveniently 14oz is not enough under 400g to count as "undersize" in the regulations, so generously filled 14oz tins produced compliant 400g batches when Britain went metric.

Hmm, never knew that. :)

I knew of the Bread Act that set it 1lb/2lb, and the Middle Ages origins that worked "backwards" - when the price of the loaf was fixed and the weight of the loaf was varied as the price of wheat changed.

In some sense that makes much more sense - the people are starving? Well, supply more grain then.

Doesn't quite gel with modern manufacturing, though!

500g coffee packs are pretty much the regular size in Germany too, at least for pre-ground [0]. Packs with whole roasted beans are usually on the bigger end.

[0] https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/354801_...

Sadly it doesn't translate very well to every kind of grocery item.

Kitchen paper towels and toilet paper can still give you a pretty good math exercise to figure out what's more affordable.

My local supermarket sells their budget fruit brands (which are actually owned/leased from the supermarket itself) as a pack with no actual weight measurement given, so the price is per apple. Every other brand lists their weight and prices are given per 100g, so if you actually want to figure out what is cheaper you need to go weigh the budget brand on the scales and then do the maths yourself!

And when I think about it, those are 2 items I’d like to buy by the kilogram.

I didn't know there was such regulation, and now I wish we could get it back. Not a month goes by without me or my wife noticing another product in the supermarket that lost a few percent of its mass while retaining its price.

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