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Comment by comrade1234 | Hacker News Reader

I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer.

Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra.

In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.

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I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared.

Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and they will say "but the box is bigger", <- actual statement from a CS PhD, demonstrating how it does not matter your education, once outside of that specialization you're an idiot.

I've met CS PhD students in AI (a field that almost exclusively uses python) be completely unable to start a python script on their machine.

Well obviously you just ask an LLM.

That was before chatgpt 3 :D

I'll admit that I tend to implicitly trust that the larger boxes on the shelves contain more. I haven't checked the price-per-unit in a bit. Granted, my closest grocery is not a WalMart and I'm typically purchasing mass-produced sundries. Basically, the "Family Size" of Cheez-its is the same at any store.

One thing I have noticed is that 5lb bags of flour/sugar haven't been standard in a hot minute.

Actually, the family size Cheez-its is one of the worst offenders, they are not 1/3rd less, more like 50% less product.

Than what? It's 21oz compared to the 7oz regular size and 12.4oz "Pantry Size".

It's like $5-$6 for the box. That's been true at both the local grocery and WalMart.

It's actually not a complete loss, you can convince your girlfriend that it's 8 inches by measuring it against a "2x4" :-).

FWIW in Switzerland (and surely other places too) you have on the price tag also the price per 100g (or ml or whatever) so you can quickly compare without bothering much with basic maths. Same for online shopping.

And a ridiculously high percentage of the time markdown prices on the shelves at Walmart are not reflected at checkout. Happened to me just this weekend. Walmart, one of the largest companies in the USA, whose job is to sell items, can't do the basics of keeping pricing/signage in sync? BS.

>Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents

in EU labels must show prices per kilogram of product, to make this kind of fuckery harder

Isn't this required in US stores now as well? Everywhere I go I see a $/oz next to the price.

Edit: I guess not: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/national-legal-metrology/us-ret...

Though my state doesn't have this law and I still see it at all stores. I very much rely on it, and it should be law.

There are Chinese machine manufacturers who use fake German brand names because for a long time Germany was selling the manufacturing machinery to China and they have a good national brand image.

You don't need a fake brand: use Philips.

>Philips

not a german brand

Yes, I've heard of this effect in marketing. If you make any reference to Switzerland, it's instant sales bump, even if you hold everything else equal. This is also how you got "Häagen-Dazs" ice cream brand. It's fully American, but the name sounds vaguely Scandinavian, so it has to be better, right? Well, customers sure do think so, and are willing to pay the premium.

Not challenging your marketing presumption; I've noticed, and seen pointed out, the same thing.

As a side note, years ago Häagen-Dazs was better (high milk-fat, etc) than the other widely-available brands. It's now owned by Nestlé, so I don't buy it anymore. How much has it been enshittified?

Just from the base ingredients they still look fine.

>cream, skim milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, ground vanilla beans, vanilla extract

Compare that with Ben and Jerry's which lists sugar water third on their ingredients list and water fourth.

Ben and Jerry's enshittification makes me sad. Interestingly enough, I was told when I visited the Vermont (original, and now theme-park-ish) plant that they still use the original recipes there.

I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing happens for stuff in big box home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, too. Things like plumbing fixtures that appear to be identical to counterparts in smaller stores will have off-by-one or suffixed product numbers, and are made with cheaper plastic internal parts than when purchased elsewhere.

Or like made for Costco Levi's, Adidas, etc. Cheaper made in many ways, but looks OG from 2 feet away.

Sometimes. My Bosch washing machine died young due to cheap bearings. The AEG dryer had soldering problems and the German dishwasher's time light projector died slowly.

https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic3652484.html#1966024...

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