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Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Both photos clearly have the contents (in oz/gr) on them, and they appear perfectly standardized amounts. I don't think there's any conspiracy going on here. As to the conditioner, I quite like the trend of having multiple sizes of things (e.g. for travelling) and I'd hate the branding to be different depending on an implementation detail like the amount of product I'm buying.

I mean, you can see conspiracies everywhere if you look for them, but the examples you're showing don't convince me in the least.

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Yes, I knew someone would say this. But in the context of putting together a 60 item grocery order in 30 minutes, it’s easy to miss some data points. I would imagine a large number of people would be occasionally misled by things like this unless they’re paying close attention.

Every scam in the world can be avoided if the customer pays enough attention. One can always say - pay more attention and you won't get scammed. This doesn't make the practice any less scummy.

But the question is - is there any indication of intent to mislead. They just don't pay much attention to how things look when photographed for online shopping, it seems to me.

This is one of the situations that should be approached with Hanlon's handgun, not Hanlon's razor.

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice."

C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691282

Of course they say the amounts—I believe that's regulated by the FDA for such products.

That does not in any way mean they aren't deliberately making their smaller products look larger by proportionally shrinking down the font sizes.

Yep, came here to say this. We buy looking at the grams, not the jar or tube.

Manufacturers actually pay for the volume of space used in stores. The more efficiently they use the space, the better. Having smaller jars or tubes for the same grams is a good thing!

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