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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

When I can, I don't look at prices, I only look at $/unit.

Some stores (like WalMart and Costco) make this very easy, and I pick the cereal with the best $/unit price.

Pro tip for other readers: often enough, the smaller box that usually has a higher cost/oz will be on sale making it a better deal than a larger/bulk size which isn’t. Reasons for not making both on sale unclear, but I see it all the time.

What I hate is when I'm shopping on Amazon and it's one for $5, or get a pack of fifty for $7. There's no way I'm ever going to buy the one at such a price disparity, so I end up with a house full of 48 unused items.

Same, and it's really annoying from a waste/hassle perspective. Just last week I was buying dish soap. Something like 32 oz for 6.99, or 16 oz for 2.99 on sale. So here I am stuck buying 2 packages out of spite.

The most egregious example of this I’ve ever seen was at a liquor store where a 750ml bottle of Vermouth was double the price of a 1750ml bottle. Not double per ml, double of the absolute price.

Was it in a jurisdiction where there's heavy state control of liquor sales? Those don't behave like usual markets do.

Because only a hard core alcoholic would buy 1750ml bottle of Vermouth? For everyone else 750ml is a lifetime amount. My martini recipe started at 3 parts gin, wave uncapped bottle of vermouth, add olive.

Step 2 is now show gin a picture of a Closed bottle of vermouth

Never understood the fear of vermouth?

Fear of vermouth or love of straight gin?

Just call it "a glass of gin with an olive" then and accept who you are as a person.

The next step is removing the olive.

That’s when you true acceptance has been achieved.

But surely that’s a reason for the larger bottle to cost more, not less?

I wound up doing that with dental floss over a decade ago. I'm still working through that haul, and I floss every day. Fortunately, they don't take much space.

I did that once for a much cheaper dental floss. I ended up with ~120 units of floss I could never use (besides it was not great fit for my teeth).

I ended up giving them all away that year with the Halloween candy. Told every kid to take one along with the candy. Accompanying moms kept giving me a thumbs up.

Likewise, my wife tends to freely give out stuff on our local buy-nothing group (though honestly we don't tend to do mass purchases anymore).

What I hate is when I'm shopping on Amazon and it's one for $5, or get a pack of fifty for $7.

If the majority of the cost of selling cheap things on Amazon is fixed (Amazon stocking fees, carrier fees, etc) then the actual profit to the seller on the $7 item is probably higher than it is on the $5 item. They know very few people will buy the $5 individual item; it exists to make the higher priced, higher profit item look like a bargain.

If it's something that's nonperishable that you're eventually going to use, like toilet paper or soap, then so long as you have the storage space the fifty pack is a screaming bargain.

The one I see all the time is something is 10oz and 20oz. If I buy 2 10s it should be about the same price as 1 20. But many times the 20oz is a decent percentage higher. So buy 2 smalls. But that does not always hold true so you have to look every time. No 'sales' price. Just the price will be randomly different.

Coffee is like this a lot. I always check $/oz of the 20oz bag and the 12oz bag, and there's often a 10-20% difference in unit price for the same brand between the two sizes and I'll just buy whichever is cheaper.

If you care about bang for buck at all, Amazon is likely the worst place to do online shopping. Their search is one giant dark pattern. It's good for finding new products if you don't know a good search query (yet). Then you can get the same thing cheaper from China.

I see stores obfuscate this all the time by showing some unit prices as per lb, some per oz, and some per 100 count, all for different versions of the same product.

Thankfully this is a non issue in metric countries. Unless they put one in an actual unit and one in a per item.

Me too, but I'm not savvy enough to track these changes over time. I wouldn't normally remember what the price per 100g was last month, even if it matched this month's sale price.

It's not a sure thing. The other common way to raise prices without raising the per-item price is to use more of a low-cost input and less of a high-cost input. For a fictional example, if Croesus circulated electrum (mixed gold/silver) coins as the internal currency of Lydia, and increasing trade with China then spiked the value of silver, you'd expect to see new coins use more gold and less silver while maintaining the same face value.

I have paid an ever increasing amount of attention to the $/unit price, especially with coffee. It can be surprising.

Good for chocolate as well. I've found chocolate chips are about half the cost of bars at our store for whatever reason. One is the amount is larger.

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