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Shrinkflation has started with non-dairy milk...
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I really only shop for food based on unit price, but sometimes there's no consistency with the unit of measurement among different stores or even the same store!
And some stores will put items on sale with a unit price, but you don't know if the unit price is the sale amount or the regular price...
It's like stores either don't want you to spend money there, or they do their best to confuse the hell out of people.
They don't want you making economically informed decisions. Rational decisions are less profitable. They want emotional decisions so they can sneakily charge more.
Yup. Costco is usually pretty good about this, but I was buying something where they had $/oz and $/lb for a similar product, and other products have $/ea if they happen to be individually packaged. I still find I need to calculate it, which is really annoying.
I don't know how Canada is, but I could see it being even more confusing if mixing metric and imperial units (e.g. for US imports).
So yeah, it's incredibly annoying for those of us who care about cost per weight/volume instead of cost per package.
Oh, it can get frustrating. For example, potatoes by the bag are often listed as price per 100 g, while potatoes sold individually are price per lb or kg, if you are lucky.
A tray of baking potatoes is priced "per tray" and not per weight of the potatoes. "Small white potatoes" are listed in price per 100ml on the same website... LOL
And that's all stuff listed on websites. Go into a store and you're lucky to even have a unit price listed. Shopping has become either guesswork or based purely on experience.
Ew.
I'm fortunate that the stores I shop at display price per weight or volume for pretty much everything, but it varies a bit product to product in terms of what units they use.
Surely this isn't a hard problem to solve, especially in Canada where you can just standardize on metric. Comparing price per 100g and kg is easy, just move the decimal place one. Comparing price per oz and lb is difficult, since you need to divide/multiply by 16, and that's not easy to do with mental math.
Part of me thinks it's malicious, but perhaps the simpler explanation is that these companies just don't care.
Yeah, I don't mind that too much. Amazon uses per KG and Walmart tends to use per 100g on things like cereal, so it's an easy conversion.
It does help to shop at the same store(s), since you kind of know what things should be, even before unit prices come into play. That is, assuming you aren't caught off by shrinkflation, then you need to also remember the size/weight of an item to know if it's a good deal based on price alone.
This is why 99% of my grocery shopping is done online, building a list first, rather than on-the-fly inside of store. Once I've done my comparison shopping and built a list, I go to shop or set aside the order for pick-up.
I would order online, but the stores I prefer to shop at either charge extra for online orders (e.g. Costco), or generally don't have the best prices (e.g. local grocery). I wish I could easily comparison shop at Costco vs other stores, but that's just not practical since Costco charges more for online orders even before adding in the delivery charge.
So I'm left to memorizing the per-unit prices of things I order frequently.
That's super frustrating! I've had that happen a few times (Not with Costco) and I'm either forced to leave the store empty-handed or pay more than I expected.
And never mind delivery charge, places around here charge you for picking the stuff up! Unless you “subscribe” to their pick-up/delivery plan. What in the actual hell???
Ikr? And it's not just groceries, movie theaters also charge on online ticket ordering fee, so we end up driving the 2-ish miles to use their kiosk (basically the same thing) to avoid the stupid fee. In fact, we go to movie theaters less because of it.
I know some people will just pay it, but I'm not willing to, and it saddens me that it's probably more lucrative to do these anti-consumer things.