[m_eiman]

Here in Sweden we have a law that forces shops to provide a "comparison price" on the price tag. Depending on the type of product, it's the price per volume, weight or unit. This makes it trivial to compare prices between products of different package sizes, and to notice shrinkflation.

Doesn't help detect changed ingredients that lower quality, though.

I thought this was a EU thing, but a quick search suggests that maybe it's something specific to us?

[joefife]

Unsure if it's law in the UK - but every UK supermarket I've visited has price per 100g / kg / litre / 100ml on every product.

Rather amusingly (to me!), lavatory paper has a price per sheet, which is abbreviated "sht"... https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/304782328

[lozenge]

It is the law, with an exception for small shops, food "to go", etc. But, it only applies to the ordinary price. Any multibuy or conditional offer is excluded. Now stores have started putting the real price behind a free loyalty card without a unit price, and a ridiculous fake price (like, 2x or more) on the ordinary price tag. The Competition and Markets Authority has started an investigation.

[globular-toast]

That's good to know an investigation has been started. I can't believe anyone would fall for the "clubcard price" nonsense but requiring a clubcard and displaying a fake ridiculous price should both be illegal.

[maxehmookau]

It's not a case of "falling" for it. It's a case of being effectively forced to sign up for these schemes to pay a reasonable price for shopping.

I hope the CMA comes down hard. It's disgusting.

[nonrandomstring]

Tesco pioneered some of the most hilariously sharp practices that mean you really need to have your wits (or enough money to not care) with you.

"30p each or only 3 for £1" isn't a joke. I saw this in a London store when they tried making multi-pack offers near the checkout actually more expensive than picking up separate items.

"Meal Deals" are a fantastic scam that charge you more for eating less. If you don't take the crisps or drink it doesn't "count" as the meal-deal, and the individual items cost more. I end up buying an extra bag of crisps I don't want and giving it to the homeless person outside.

Like many British supermarkets they operate a three tier pricing structure, normal, discounted (with yellow labels) and "Clubcard" prices. These are applied to similar items on proximate shelves, so you're never quite sure which ones the offers apply to. Sometimes those little yellow stickers don't scan, and surprise.. you pay the original price.

And don't get me started on automatic checkouts, which are basically "mugging robots" designed to rob humans.

Supermarkets are playgrounds for screwing people over with little mind games. What a desolation of human life for those who waste their days thinking up this shit.

[getwiththeprog]

I kind of consider supermarket practices a "stupidity tax", Ab Fab really has something to take responsibility for here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsohPbnp1b8

(Skip to 3.25 in the video for the classic quote).

[nonrandomstring]

Thannks for that big laugh, Patsy and Ed never fail to deliver.

[robertlagrant]

> "Meal Deals" are a fantastic scam that charge you more for eating less. If you don't take the crisps or drink it doesn't "count" as the meal-deal, and the individual items cost more.

How is "If you add a third item the price sometimes goes down" a scam?

[globular-toast]

The real price is the "meal deal" price. The individual prices are scam prices which buyers will often pay if they aren't paying complete attention.

[robertlagrant]

I don't think that's quite true. If I just want a bottle of water I wouldn't buy a meal deal to get the real price. Some of the meal deal items are subsidised more than others, it's true, but that doesn't make it a scam. Paying £3.50 or whatever for quite a lot of stuff is pretty amazing.

[baz00]

M&S run the real scam. They don't even do a meal deal. It just costs you £7.

[nonrandomstring]

How is "if you try not to eat more than you need and create environmental and energy waste, we will punish you" not a scandal ?

[andyjohnson0]

> And don't get me started on automatic checkouts, which are basically "mugging robots" designed to rob humans.

How does that work? Are you saying they charge more for the same purchases?

[MereInterest]

They charge the same price for slower service.

Please place your item in the bagging area. Unrecognized item in the bagging area. Please scan items one at a time.

[rowanG077]

That an implementation problem. In the Netherlands self checkouts are very quick and painless. There are no weird ceremonials or a bagging area or whatever.

[Gud]

That’s a very specific thing for the UK.

I have not seen those annoying checkout scales anywhere else in Europe.

[extraduder_ire]

When the unit price is only shown for the non-discounted price, I usually pull up my phone's calculator out of spite if I don't know what it works out to mentally.

Another thing that annoys me is there being no indication of how long a sale or promotion is running. Lidl does this correctly, and puts a to/from date on the price tag in tiny text. (for internal use, I assume. but still super useful)

"Clubcard prices" somehow avoid the laws on misleading discounts as well, where the price you're discounting from needs to be the lowest price that product was on sale for for the preceding 30 days.

[2Gkashmiri]

In india, very recently they started mandating small value comparisons.

/g, /ml because its easier to say Rs. 2.04/g as compared to Rs. 204/100g. This makes so much more easy to compare

[baz00]

The units are disingenuously applied in Tesco at least though which makes it difficult to compare.

For example you might have price per sht (well you need at least 4 per sh*t ;) but there will also be a 2 for 1 offer with no price per sht and then a multi pack with no offer on it with a different price per sht. So you have three factors to compare to work out how many sh*ts per sht are best value. And then there's the confusion of loyalty card only prices.

I have got to the point I'd rather shop at Waitrose because they don't pull that sht.

On that note I think I'll go to Morrisons today and be mugged differently.

[gilleain]

> I think I'll go to Morrisons today and be mugged differently

This is a beautiful sentence, i think.

Same sh*t, different day I suppose.

[baz00]

Yeah it is nice to at least have a little variation in sh*t though sometimes.

[riffraff]

it is an EU thing [0][1]

   Easy comparison – price per unit
   You should also be able to compare prices between brands and between package sizes – to see, for example, what saving you'd make buying a large-size box of breakfast cereal instead of a small box.
   To help you do this, all products must be marked not only with the selling price, but also the price per unit – for example, the price per kilo or per litre. This information must be understandable, easy to read, and easily identifiable.
   This rule also applies to adverts that mention a selling price.

Notice this does not apply uniformly since it delegates to national regulations, so e.g. IIRC in Italy supermarkets list the number of "bits" you can rip off a toilet paper roll, but in Hungary they don't.

^0 https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...

^1 https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...

[kranke155]

Its a beautifully simple measure that helps me every day.

[g-b-r]

Yes it's crazy how much it helps, I always look at them now when choosing among products

I almost feel sorry for the producers

[toxik]

I do use these labels when shopping, and it does help quite a bit. There are other underhanded tricks they use though.

Incompatible goods. Buy 8 buns for a 6 hotdog package. Jam jars of 600 mL but refill packets of 750 mL. Absolute madness. Why do you do this?

Store's own brand is like 20-30% cheaper across the board. How is this even possible?

And the worst one:

Incompatible units in comparison price. You buy popsicles, one box has them in money/popsicle, one box has them in money/volume frozen water.

[HenryBemis]

> Store's own brand is like 20-30% cheaper across the board. How is this even possible?

No need for marketing costs. Also companies compete for shelf space (sometimes they will have to pay to have their products placed in a favorable spot). Also they buy BULK. When (e.g. Tesco) buys bread they issue the recipe they want and they guarantee LARGE volumes.

Regarding the comparisons, in EU they got labels that give you cost per 100ml or 100gr or per item.

[ponector]

Also a quality of such cheaper own brands is lower. Tesco Value is garbage, but they have premium brands which are not cheaper than popular external brands and with decent quality.

And I have a feeling they intentionally increase price of other brands to force people to buy store's brands.

[g-b-r]

They are not always lower, in my experience only some store brands are (on average) of lower quality.

And many individual products are still good enough.

[toxik]

The unit issue is in the EU. You can't sell everything by 100 g or 100 mL, so it is ultimately up to the seller. Another example of it is toilet paper, sometimes given in money/square, sometimes given in money/length.

[g-b-r]

The stores which have their own brands will also often simply set higher prices for the other brands

[mkl]

You can't use that to detect shrinkflation unless you remember the old price per unit, right?

Some NZ supermarkets have that kind of labelling, but not always for every product.

My regular (soon to be former) cereal has gone from 700g to 620g to 535g in about 3 months, all for the same price. The box has the same width and height, but the depth has been shrinking.

[andersrs]

I'm creating a browser extension to display unit pricing on some NZ supermarket sites that don't have it.

[xzjis]

It seems that the proposal from South Korea is different though, because it will show a before-after comparison, which isn't required in Europe. So I don't know for you, but I personally don't remember what's the per kg price of every single product I buy. If it increased and all other products increased too, I will not have any reference point.

[ponector]

There is a nice new law in Poland which require online stores to publish prices together with minimum price for the last 30 days.

Good thing to not be hooked by fake discounts.

[getwiththeprog]

GOG.com is doing this with video games - is it due to the law there?

[Tenemo]

Yep!

[generic92034]

It still helps, though, unless the shrinkflation hits the shelves for all competing products at the same time. If one brand starts with a higher per unit price, they will lose some customers comparing the per unit price with other brands.

[augustk]

The comparison price is often tiny though:

"The price per unit is displayed with a font size of roughly 20 mm while the comparison price is just under 2 mm" (freely translated from Swedish)

https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/moti...

[bryanrasmussen]

sure, we have the same thing in Denmark - but even with my fading eyesight I can read it fine.

[globular-toast]

This is great, but who the hell remembers what the price per litre was the last time they bought shampoo? This does not make it trivial to track shrinkflation at all. This is for comparing products that are currently on the shelf.

[LelouBil]

We also have this in France. I don't know if it's a legal requirement, but I see it everywhere, so I'm pretty sure it is.

[germanier]

Yes, it's an EU-wide legal requirement (directive 98/6/EC on consumer protection in the indication of the prices of products offered to consumers).

[walthamstow]

We have the same in the UK. On rare occasions there is a bad comparison between two products, one will be per kg and the other per item, but otherwise it's a great system.

The problem in the US is that food/ag corporations are powerful and always fight against this kind of consumer information. Same with ingredient and nutrition labelling. They want the consumer to have as little information as possible (information asymmetry is the term in economics).

[nulbyte]

It may not be a law here in the US, but most stores do it anyway. Meijer, Kroger, Walmart all have per-unit prices in a corner of the tag. Most of the time, sale prices have them too.

[fifilura]

The example of "lower quality ingredients" that I have noticed in Sweden on a slippery slope is milk chocolate.

In particular Marabou, which is (debatably) some kind of gold standard for kids chocolate in Sweden.

I think they gradually decrease the amount of cocoa and check if customers accept it. And when they do it a little at a time of course no one notices.

[walthamstow]

See also: Cadbury (UK) after they were bought by Kraft (US). I don't buy their products any more. A 150yo family company ruined in less than a geneation.

[ksec]

To be fair the downfall of Cadbury started before Kraft got their hands on it when they started moving production to Poland.

[WirelessGigabit]

Same in the US, but then one product does it per oz, and the other one per lbs.

Or when I lived in Belgium it was per 100ml, or per liter, or per 100 grams which aren't necessarily the same.

[scotty79]

In Poland there's also price per unit but with way smaller font than the price.

[janosdebugs]

The main issue with this is that nobody I know shops by price per unit. Once the item with the new price per unit is out few people will remember the old one.

[g-b-r]

You can always compare the same kinds of products, they'll always be next to each other

[zanellato19]

We have this in Brazil too and it is great.

And it is a law that if you decrease the weight of the product, you need to call that out on the label.

It works great.

[pwagland]

It seems widespread within the EU, not sure if it is EU mandated though. The Netherlands also has this.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

It's a thing in Norway too. Even toilet paper has a price per meter.

[wkat4242]

We have the same in Spain yes