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Comment by breakbread | 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.

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

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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