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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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