Hacker News Reader

In Hong Kong Haagen-Daz sells an icecream on a stick. It's packaged in a plastic wrapper inside a paper box. I bought it once and when I finally got through all the packaging the actual icecream was half the size of the box it came in! What a rip-off.

View on HN

Gratuitous over-packaging in Asia is not really meant to rip you off, it's meant to make the product upscale. There's a strange subconscious feeling that anything lacking fancy wrappings is somehow worth less.

Serving sizes also tend to be much smaller in most parts of Asia, compared to America anyways. But then again, serving sizes in America tend to be much larger than most other parts of the world.

I hate unnecessary packaging of any kind. Especially when theres so much of it it becomes a struggle to get through. Unfortunately I dont think its limited to Asia.

Last year this time, A Hong Kong TV station did an investigation report on how much "chocolate" was in the store packaged Christmas chocolate presents. It was mostly wrapping.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com