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Comment by esyir | Hacker News Reader

This is something that would be improved by something common in the eu. Price /weight or volume on labels.

We have that in supermarkets in the northeastern US. It's great about half the time. The other half, they make you bust out the calculator unless you really trust your mental arithmetic. The small one is priced per liter, but the big one is priced per gallon. The big one is priced per pound, the small one is priced per ounce.

I really wish more people cared about this, because the obvious solution (mandating SI units) would help finally move us toward metric...

You'd think so, but here in Canada the groceries play the same games by changing the definition of 'per unit' in different ways, for example price per 100g vs. price per kg vs. price per serving/capsule/sub-pack.

There used to be rules per product/category, specifying certain sizes and prohibiting all others. So sugar was always 500g, never 460g or whatever.

I’m fine with the standardized prices now, and that seems to work for most customers.

I appreciate that all prices in shops here also show the price per kg/liter or per individual unit in case of things like eggs.

As a downside, it does lead to "crafty consumers" using the unit price as their highest priority criteria for selecting products, and disregarding factors like quality and nutrition. This leads to way too many products in the ultra low price segment, and a hard time for makers of higher quality products.

It's a race to the bottom, and shrinkflation still happens.

Going by price/kg is the best way to get around it. One still has to avoid low-quality products but that would apply if you looked at nothing but the packaging as well.

> it does lead to "crafty consumers" using the unit price as their highest priority criteria for selecting products, and disregarding factors like quality and nutrition.

That will happen no matter what. If you are poor you pay attention to price of the things you buy more then quality.

I know it from practice, only when you have some financial stability you can educate yourself to pick the best product and not just kg/$.

> This leads to way too many products in the ultra low price segment, and a hard time for makers of higher quality products.

I don't think there is any kind of competition between quality product vs cheap products. Be it food or tools or etc. Both cater to different segment. Its like saying that if ford or fiat slash their prices by half, mercedes will loose some of the customers.

Poorer people don't have much choice but to settle for cheaper options. When you have more money you will not buy processed food etc even though its cheap then quality unprocessed food because its hidden cost of health damage is too high.

>As a downside, it does lead to "crafty consumers" using the unit price as their highest priority criteria for selecting products

Literally nobody shops by trying to buy the cheapest calories per unit. Calories are simply too easy to come by for that to matter. What people do is they make a menu (not necessarily before they go to the store) for the next 1-N meals then they choose brands or products that will accomplish that in the cheapest manner possible. This means they see the numbers and buy house brand butter. Where you get into issues is stuff like eggs where it's kind of hard to tell if the increase in size by buying large outweighs the savings per dozen by buying medium or where substitute products are not sold in easily convertible units and you have to do much more math in your head.

Ah, you must not be friends with some of my friends then.

I know at least 2 people who have min/max'd their calories/dollar to peanut butter and rice and beans.

The race to the bottom is happening because of inflation. Prices rise but not all salaries do, people have less money and they care more about the price.

>Price /weight or volume on labels.

That's already a thing in the supermarkets I go to

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