same in the UK, some items priced per kg and others per 100g - not insurmountable but just another slight hump in the road to easy comparison when you're stood there.
Canada does this, but often products are sold per kg, lb, or 100g. Frequently, different tiers of quality are sold in different units, so comparison shopping is that much more tedious. And the 100g thing is especially pernicious -- all too often, a first glance indicates a 50% discount that careful examination shows to be a 5x markup!
It's hard for people to make the comparisons between brands, sizes, so on and so forth. Australia recently passed legislation requiring supermarkets to list the price-per-unit-weight/volume alongside the product price. So on a food item, you'll see the price for the product, and also the price per 100 grams.
It means things are directly comparable across brands and sizes ("how does this 117g portion compare to this 270g one?"). It's a fantastic bit of legislation.
This is a thing in Germany, e.g. one large grocery chain sells "premium" tomatos for prices like "1.99€/100g", which makes intuitive comparison hard for some, especially because those who look for prices per mass usually compare kilo prices, and most are just used to 200g or 350g trays, sometimes a pound, not comparing prices per weight at all.
A lot of stores in Germany do something else, where they'll use the price per 100g for one brand and price per 1kg for another in order to make it just slightly harder to realize how expensive something is at a glance.
The grocery store I usually visit shows the price for all of its products both per unit and (much smaller, below it) in price per kilogram. I look at that all the time, and it's often surprising which of the products is actually the cheapest, and how large the differences can be between seemingly very similar products.
Are we talking about stuff that can vary in size but isn't weighted? Like kiwi's or cucumbers have a fixed price each while apples or bananas have a kg price. But I don't remember seeing processed food without a kg price.
The only time I remember having difficulty comparing was different formats of toilet paper when our usual brand was out of stock... #rolls × #sheets / pack price was a bit to much for me to do in my head. Yeah, I'm not really complaining.
I find it most frustrating when you go to a shop and there's two things roughly equivalent you want to buy, one of them is $2 for 200 mL and the other is $1.80 for 180 g.
There's every other kind of trickery in the shops to prevent you from being able to assess the relative value of two products, to render those price comparisons redundant (like the fact that the two products are listed, one $/100 g and the other listed $/kg).
I've just moved to Germany, and here it's almost impossible to buy the thing you want — they always seem to subpackage it into segments so that you have to use more than you want and therefore come back. I thought the marketplace was hostile in Australia sheesh.
(But, 750 megalitres is significantly more than 750 litres.)
In The Netherlands they bypass this by having one of the item brands in 'price per subitem' and one in 'price per kg'.
So say you buy some chocolate. Both are in a 12 piece carton. Brand A will note €0,10 per piece whereas brand B will note €0,15 per 100g.
I remember learning that you can't rely on listed price for grocery items, but must check the per kilogram or per liter price. Because bigger containers are usually cheaper. But not always.
I still buy tuna that's 0.1 euro per kilogram cheaper ... I really don't know whether the savings are ever going to add up to anything and I'm almost certain it's not worth the 30 seconds it takes to check. But I can't not do it.
In Britain they also have some unit-price law. But Tesco blatantly abuses it: eg one kind of apple is priced by piece, the next goes per 100g (or per 1kg, but converting between 100g and 1kg is simpler).
In Canada (or maybe just Ontario?) we have price per unit weight. Like “$0.38 per 100 grams”
It’s a required part of a price label in grocery stores.
I suspect this exists elsewhere too. It works fine enough. I don’t see a need for anything further. It’s really simple and anyone who needs simpler probably won’t benefit from simpler anyways.
I live in Spain and when you go to supermarkets, all price tags on the shelves and on supermarket-packaged products (pre-cut meat, for example) indicate the cost of the product per unit (big numbers), and per kilo (small numbers), so, if you want, you can quickly and easily compare a package of, say, 136g of meat with other packages, without weight interfering. You can see easily the price per kilo of each kind of meat.
In Australian supermarkets the cost per unit weight net (typically 100 grams) has to be printed on shelf under / next to the price.
I've proposed the idea that the price of everything in the supermarket be averaged per unit weight, checking out then becomes just a matter of weighing the trolley / basket.
I see complications / gaming the system, fun idea though.
Maybe just knowing how much you spend per average kg of food, or per unit of energy, could be a useful metric for optimizing food expenses.
I don’t know what the correct term is in English but in my country, “comparative pricing” is mandatory, so when you’re buying coffee for example there’s a secondary price listed that tells you what the cost is per kilogram or whatever other unit makes sense.
For me this already solves the problem, because what I really care about isn’t whether I get 500g or 400g of coffee, I care about the real price compared to the other options on the shelf.
I think this point is underappreciated. Sometimes it definitely makes sense to pay more per unit/kg for some item for a smaller quantity if otherwise you'd be throwing out an excess
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