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Comment by completelylegit | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of people don’t think about or understand advertising and marketing - if they did it wouldn’t work as well as it does.

Amazon has tons of little “ha ha tricked you” ways of making more money these days.

Next time you but an N-pack of anything on Amazon - more often than not the pack costs more per unit.. thats not how economy of scale is supposed to work right?

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Generally when you see that, the N-pack is sold by a marketplace seller (and there's a good chance it was packaged that way by the mp seller to get a better chance of a sale by offering something unique).

I have noticed this in supermarkets as well. Either it is to trick the consumers but could equally be consumers would rather buy 6 cans of X in a pack than go to the effort of taking 6 cans individually off the shelf.

The easy proof of this is in the cracker section: "family size" is always priced more per unit than smaller sizes.

I don't know where you all shop but I check unit prices all the time and rarely see an inversion.

Agreed. It does happen, but it's an exception not the rule.

I spent my first 7 years out of college building business intelligence software for grocery retailers. My guess is that when it happens, it's a f-up rather than something nefarious. Especially with Amazon, whose seller interface is pretty much user-hostile.

I would say it happens commonly enough that one must constantly keep one's eye out. For example at my local H.E.B. I see this all the time.

64oz Store brand half and half: $3.50 (avg range $3.25-3.68)

32oz Store brand half and half: $1.50 (avg range $1.25-1.68)

Um, wat?

This thread will close by then, but I'll take a picture the next time I see it. Repost this in one year and I'll have something.

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