[fishtoaster]

As with many simple ubiquitous consumer products from pizza boxes to mouse traps, the answer to the question "why hasn't someone invented a better one of these?" is "they have, but it it's more expensive."

Many things in life could be better. The reason they're not is the same reason airplanes are uncomfortable and broadcast TV has obnoxious ads: the revealed preferences of consumers for those things is the cheaper version, not the better version. The same is true for pizza boxes.

[xg15]

Fully agree except for the "the consumer wants it that way" take.

The consumer "wants" this in the same way they "want" ad breaks, sugar-swamped food or addictive phone apps: It's the most shitty version of a product that a sufficient part of the population is still willing to pay money for, likely because there are other advantages that just so make up for the shittyness (or in the case of addictiveness because the product just manages to hack the consumer's brain).

This is all about serving the lowest possible quality for the highest possible price, nothing about that has to do with "preferences".

[fishtoaster]

Ah, I was using the term "revealed preference" which has a slightly more nuanced meaning[0].

In the colloquial sense, yeah, we all have a preference for "good pizza" and "cheap pizza." But those two things are generally a tradeoff: better pizza costs more. There exists some equilibrium point in the middle where either making the pizza better + more expensive or making the pizza cheaper + worse will reduce sales (within a given population), and pizza shops will tend to coalesce around providing pizza at that equilibrium.

The position of that equilibrium point is the "revealed preference" of a population. We might say we want better pizza than is currently being provided, but when we vote with our wallets, we (collectively) tend towards pizza that costs as much as it does and is as good as it is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

[setr]

But we can also pay for good, or expensive pizza, and we will find the box remains the same. If it were simply consumer preferences, then we’d expect this to no longer be the case as we enter more price-agnostic tiers of consumerism.

Unless of course no one cares about the box, so the increased cost literally does nothing, but that just means the improved boxes are not actually an improvement.

More specifically, don’t look at the market as a single unit, but as various buckets with various equilibriums. We expect Mercedes to target the equilibrium point… but not of the entire market (that’s what Jettas and Camrys are for) but rather their niche.

[_tom_]

And all of the problems he talks about with the pizza are the result of this process applied to the pizza itself, not the box. Ingredient quality has plummeted, and the amount of sugar added is unbelievable. Some chain pizzas smell more like donuts that pizza.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

And then there is cauliflower pizza dough.

[rizzom5000]

> This is all about serving the lowest possible quality for the highest possible price, nothing about that has to do with "preferences".

I'm trying to follow this logically. Are you saying that if there were two options for a burger right next to another; say a McDonald's and a 5 Guys - the choice to buy a cheeseburger from 5 Guys instead of McDonald's has nothing to do with my preferences? I can come up with at least a dozen criteria for which the 5 Guys burger is objectively superior to the McDonald's offering, but choosing to pay more for that objectively superior product does not reveal preference?

[anonymouskimmer]

This reminded me of the 1/3 pounder burger. The actual preference of consumers was for a larger burger (or cheaper relative to size). The so-called "revealed preference" is that half of the consumers were bad at fractions.

https://culinarylore.com/food-history:aw-1-3-pound-burger-fa...

"The firm conducted a focus group and found that around half of the people surveyed thought that the A&W 1/3 pound burger was smaller than McDonald’s 1/4 pounder! “Why should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat?” they said."

[yamtaddle]

You gonna pick McDonald's instead because the Five Guys burger box is cheaper and doesn't function quite as well? Should we take your still choosing Five Guys as a sign that you prefer that box?

[kuboble]

Yes. exactly. Quoting GP:

> the revealed preferences of consumers for those things is the cheaper version, not the better version.

[yamtaddle]

No, you cannot pick out the preference for one component of the offering that way. If there'd been a 5-cents-higher option with the better box, they might have chosen that. You can only compare the entire offerings—convenience, quality of all components combined, cost, customer service, and so on, and say that that entire bucket was what they preferred to the other entire bucket.

[marcosdumay]

Well, with non-diversified commodities, in a market with instant arbitration and universal complete knowledge about the products the Econ 101 models work.

On the real world, they don't.

[savanaly]

>This is all about serving the lowest possible quality for the highest possible price, nothing about that has to do with "preferences".

Competition leads to the opposite, and I don't see any tangible argument for why it would be otherwise in this case. Like with the cranks you run into online who claim they've discovered flaws in the paradigms of physics, it's the burden of the internet commenter to provide evidence alongside their claim, in my view.

[danaris]

Competition leads to the opposite in an idealized free market.

What we have is not a spherical market cow in a vacuum; it is a real live market with all kinds of non-ideal aspects to it. The biggest one of those is the gradual transfer of wealth from the poorest among us to the richest over the past several decades. This means that the poorest X% of consumers are vastly more price-sensitive than they would be if the productivity-to-wage ratio had remained the same since the mid-'70s.

[TradingPlaces]

The perfect pizza box has been invented, but Apple hoards that IP, and keeps it from The People.

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/78/74/d5/3374ac3...

[trynewideas]

https://designawards.core77.com/Packaging/62804/Zume-Pizza-P...

Zume, which pivoted from kitchen robotics and IoT to pizza: https://archive.ph/TP9nb

To food packaging: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-zume-become-packaging-inn...

Zume no longer lists the Pizza Pod in their catalog: https://docsend.com/view/gxeeruv7mi3mbg4p

There are knockoffs going for $1.25/unit (uline's equivalent traditional square cardboard box is $0.78/unit, Pratt sells square cardboard boxes custom-printed for $0.84-$1.48/unit): https://www.goodstartpackaging.com/pizzaround-pizza-box-12-1...

[TradingPlaces]

Seems to be missing the all important steam vents (32 in patent drawings)

[fortran77]

In fact, this was in the article we're discussing!

> "Even Apple—that Apple—has patented its own round pizza box exclusively for its famished Cupertino office workers"

and they link to the patent and show a photo.

[ohgodplsno]

In typical Apple fashion, this pizza box only holds perfectly round pizzas, churned in a factory to all look the same, ignoring the work of craftsmen and artisans that make non-round pizzas.

[microtherion]

For the benefit of readers who may not realize you’re joking, it may be worth pointing out that this box was designed for use in Apple’s cafeterias, which serve artisanal pizzas baked in wood fired ovens: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa784v/sources-apples-pizza-...

[danaris]

Until 2029, when the patent expires and anyone can make one...

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

This is also the same reason why so many newspapers and magazines are filled with fluffer BS articles such as this one instead of real investigative journalism: these types of articles are much cheaper and quicker to produce than investigative journalism. These empty complaint type articles are basically the website doing the minimum to fill space and get clicks.

[mindslight]

> the revealed preferences of consumers for those things is the cheaper version, not the better version

I really hate the framing that puts this on consumers as if they're just stingy. The reality is that we have an economy that strongly discourages most people from choosing any option besides the cheapest. When someone comes up with a less expensive way of doing something, the Fed interprets this as a problem and creates enough new currency to make sure the cost of living gets more expensive regardless. So rather than a choice between less expensive and more expensive, what consumers are actually confronted with is a choice between slightly more expensive and much more expensive.

[tshaddox]

I made the same argument recently when someone repeated the line “air travel is bad because consumers will always choose the cheapest option.” I’m pretty skeptical that almost any “race to the bottom” scenarios are easily attributed to consumer behavior, except perhaps in cases of commoditization where consumers reject attempts to differentiate products based on things like branding.

[yamtaddle]

Part of the trouble with these is that, due to companies desiring to maximally exploit price discrimination or because of lack of economies of scale or whatever, the better thing is often unreasonably more expensive, so you don't really get a signal of what people would want without that price-gouging or other price-increasing effects.

Take refrigerators. There are a few little things they could add to every single fridge that'd make them nicer, probably for $20 or so per unit, call it $100 by the time it hits retail. So your $1,100 fridge could be $1,200 but quite a bit nicer. Instead, you can't get that stuff unless you spring for the $2,000+ fridge (think: things like rollers on drawers and shelves, slightly nicer finishes, that kind of thing). Do consumers not "want" that since only a tiny minority buy fridges with those features? No, of course that's not the case. But because there is no "cheap, but with all the cheap bonuses included, so just slightly more expensive" option, it looks that way.

[tshaddox]

I agree with that, and I think it aligns with the claim that customer preferences ought not be blamed.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I’m pretty skeptical that almost any “race to the bottom” scenarios are easily attributed to consumer behavior

I'm not.

Most consumers are fickle, irrational, and often price-sensitive. They buy the $20 blender from Walmart that has a motor that will release the blue smoke in 6 months rather than the $50 blender that will last 5 years of frequent usage. Sometimes this is because of the whole "being poor is expensive" thing, but many times it's not.

> except perhaps in cases of commoditization where consumers reject attempts to differentiate products based on things like branding.

I think this applies to airlines.

I roll my eyes when someone says "I will never fly Delta/United/Alaska/etc again" because if you joined in every person's boycott because of one or two bad experiences they had, you'd never fly. They all will have delays, cancellations, and lost luggage.

I have absolutely zero loyalty or avoidance to any airline. I just go to Google Flights and pick who has the cheapest itinerary that doesn't suck too bad.

[tshaddox]

> They buy the $20 blender from Walmart that has a motor that will release the blue smoke in 6 months rather than the $50 blender that will last 5 years of frequent usage.

Ah, but that’s actually a great example. The $50 blender is probably just as crappy but with a slightly more recognizable brand (that used to make quality blenders until they were bought by a PE firm 10 years ago so they could milk the last bit of value from the trademark). You actually have to pay like $400 to get a blender that is substantially higher quality and even then you have to diligently find up to date honest reviews to make sure that brand hasn’t recently sold out.

> I have absolutely zero loyalty or avoidance to any airline. I just go to Google Flights and pick who has the cheapest itinerary that doesn't suck too bad.

Me too, much of the time. We’re not disagreeing about consumer behavior, we’re disagreeing about who to blame. The reason I do that is because there is simply no way to pay slightly more money for a slightly better flight. The only option is the cheapest possible flight, or one literally twice as expensive or more.

[tw98521358]

That’s my problem too that damn 400$ blender ends up costing me 800$ after I’ve done them due diligence of research it and burned the better half of an evening looking up reviews.

Very rarely is there a mid tier product unless it’s a Chinese brand that’s trying to establish

[anonymouskimmer]

Walmart could stock two or three price-differentiated models. With internet shopping available now (and catalog shopping in the last century and a half) Hobson's choice is less of a factor, but it's still a factor.

[gumby]

Tying this insight back to a popular and insightful HN trope: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

[anonymouskimmer]

> "and broadcast TV has obnoxious ads"

Did consumers truly have a choice here? Yes, in many cases revealed preferences caused a slippery slope, but in other cases consumer choice is effectively non-existant - it's all on the producers.

[dzhiurgis]

> airplanes are uncomfortable

Or, hear me out - FAA is in Boeing pockets. Being able to transport 2-3x more passengers equals 2-3x less airplanes sales.

If you think about it’s probably easiest way to massively reduce airplane co2 emissions too.