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Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

Well, you can (and should!) check the (mandatory) price/mass or price/volume, but of course there are very smart people being paid a lot to design the packaging so that it's sufficiently compelling for you to still put a higher value on the product...

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Expecting people to memorize the per-unit price of everything they buy and compare week to week is unrealistic.

Also, at least in the US, the price/weight for the same type of item is often in different units. ($/oz for brand A; $/lb for brand B, etc)

The EU does have some rules about this [1], "The unit price shall refer to a quantity declared in accordance with national and Community provisions", but I've still seen similar products priced per 100g and a different brand priced per "item".

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...

Here in the Netherlands, all units are metric (g, ml, g, kg). Liquid products are advertised by volume, but is they're watery (ie. most products), you can just assume litres are kilograms.

Fatty or very sugary liquid products (e.g. cream, syrup) are the only things that can't easily be compared to kg price. I've only seen those advertised by volume, so they can still be compared to their peers.

Well, after a while I do roughly memorize it for the things I buy the most, don't you roughly remember the non-per-unit price if that is what you are looking at ?

But that was not my point, the price per unit is to compare similar products with each other in the span of a minute or so.

Because if they are ALL going up (or down), then there are clearly external factors to that price change. At worst it's the fault of the supermarket (and here remembering the rough price/unit comes handy, for comparisons in others), or an issue with a monopoly/cartel collusion, in which case hopefully consumer associations are going to start whistleblowing, leading to government handing out punishments.

Sounds like a great opportunity for an AR app that can compute and overlay differences in your field of view. It would be cool to run this on the Apple Goggles. (I am not ready to see people walking around wearing those things in real life).

It's even worse when the products you are trying to compare unit prices for when one of them shares a volume unit price and the other a weight unit price and another is in counts.

These things should really be standardized.

This isn't my experience, so I went looking and found this:

> Uniform Unit Pricing Regulations apply only when stores voluntarily provide unit pricing information. The unit of measure chosen must be consistent across like items within the category.

So if a store offers unit pricing it must be consistent within a category.

https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laws-and-regulations/us-retail-...

Strange. I've never seen a store in California (which they list as requiring such things) that uses consistent units of measure.

Too bad there's not an obvious way to report violations.

I don't think I've ever seen the price per unit unit not be the across brands of the same packaging type. Now this does get dicy for individual wrapped things, but outside of that everything uses the same unit in the same range.

Even still, this is not a reasonable approach to tracking shrinkflation because I know I don't keep a running log of prices from week to week. I do sometimes notice package shrinking, but only because I buy weekly. If I wad a bulk buyer I'm not sure I'd notice as fast

Or in Canada, BC. Things like meat can be priced in $/lb or $/100g in the same cabinet. Makes the mental math tricky and you can think something is cheap when it is not.

Same in the UK, except 10g/100g/1000g so it's a bit easier to work out. Still an antipattern though.

The price per unit in US groceries is ridiculous.

You will literally have 3 packages of soda all of the same size listing the price per unit in completely different units. Some in ml, some in oz, some in pts.

I've made a userscript for this! https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/429539-unit-prices-on-krog...

Kroger doesn't publish unit prices on their websites, but they do publish quantities. They'll sometimes mix the units up (L, floz, see mapUnit() https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/429539-unit-prices-on-krog...), but generally they're OK.

The script will normalize everything to a specific metric unit & present a unit price on the page.

Why stores have this horrible setup? Probably weaponized incompetence. Would be nice to have the FTC step in with some regulation.

We don't even have standardization on the nutrition labels. The serving size is different for everything.

I had a bag of salad croutons that measured a serving as “2 Tablespoons” — are they expecting me to crush the croutons to measure a serving? Or just “eyeball” it to convert rectangular things into hemispherical things?

It's worse than that. The serving size changes the resulting label. A lot of the high-protein breads have the same composition and are sliced slightly thicker to hit the 3.5g mark so they can round up to 4g per slice and appear to be more protein rich in composition.

I've seen oil with zero calories and over 1,500 servings per container.

Just be happy they haven't switched over to butts (yet):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_(unit)

Maybe we'll be going back to hogsheads (or more likely a rundlet) though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogshead

And then I find myself checking the packaging of a frozen pizza (please don't judge me). There is a small plastic window on the front and I can tell that there is a pizza inside and from tipping it I can tell that the pizza is smaller than the box. The label says that the pizza is 500g (20 oz) which is totally useless to me because I can't remember if the box said 500, 550, or 600g when I bought it 3 months ago.

It seems extremely burdensome to do that every time you go shopping. Also, it requires people to remember the unit price of the same product across multiple trips - whereas most people who do check the unit price do so in a side by side comparison with a different brand of the same type of product.

But as a consumer I don't want to have to check the price/mass in every product everything I shop, especially if I'm buying the same brand every week.

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