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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

Safeway is somewhat insidious with things like this. They'll have a relative price (per pound/oz) for one size of an item, and then for the same item, different size, they'll use a different metric (per packet/slice, etc.) to make them not (easily) directly comparable.

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> Safeway is somewhat insidious with things like this. They'll have a relative price (per pound/oz) for one size of an item, and then for the same item, different size, they'll use a different metric (per packet/slice, etc.) to make them not (easily) directly comparable.

Unless there is a really strong pattern, I think that might be a situation were you shouldn't assume malice when stupidity will do.

I think it's quite likely they get the data from that from some feed who's ultimate source (or sources!) is someone keying in whatever's most convenient without any organizational consistency controls between items.

IIRC, every package has to have a weight/volume measure, but that doesn't make the most sense as the "unit" for many products, and there's even room for legitimate disagreement on what the right measure should be (e.g. should you list a package of sliced cheese by the slice, to use the unit the consumer is probably thinking in, or by the oz, to make it comparable to non-sliced cheese).

Such ”incompetence, not malice” errors can be trivially solved by defaulting to the consumer receiving a discount on the item in the event of variations in how the items on the shelves are labeled. Boom, you now have an army of validation specialists going around checking the consistency of your labeling. A very low-cost solution if your errors are truly good-faith and infrequent, you are paying pennies per person-hour!

Some states offer a “scanner bounty” when items transitioned from sticker labeling to scanner pricing with only shelf tags, because vendors would often not update the shelf tags or item tags appropriately when they changed the scanner database. Find an error and receive 10x the difference up to $5.

https://www.michigan.gov/ag/consumer-protection/consumer-ale...

You will rapidly find stores becoming less incompetent overnight once they have an incentive to be. It’s not that they’re not capable of being competent, there just isn’t a legal requirement or a market incentive to be competent. A law without a penalty for (knowing or un-knowing) noncompliance is just a polite request.

They are profiting and thriving off the tendency for good-natured people to adopt the “incompetence, not malice” mindset and then accept that as a normal standard of behavior. After all, what can be done? Sho ga nai.

Most stores in the US do this, and have for decades. It is definitely intentional.

Presumably the people that write the integrations shop in grocery stores, and have noticed the issue.

You would think so; on the other hand, I just met someone who works for the search team of a major search engine but hadn't noticed that their results listings had turned to garbage over the last few years.

These companies negotiate everything, including where the boxes will be located on the shelves, the angles they will be placed at, which competitors will be allowed, the pricing schemes, etc. They will never go “well for the price per unit, let’s just go with whatever random unit our internal systems spit out”.

Its extremely convenient that the mandated data that helps customers cut through the millions they spend on marketing and pricing schemes is the one that is completely uncared for.

Kroger/HarrisTeeter too…

It is definitely malice because they use every unit imaginable to avoid allowing you to compare within an item type (kg, lbs, oz, g, fl oz, “unit” (where unit = package))

Nothing that a law to stick to single unit can't fix!

Yeah I’m guessing there must be a law about putting the unit prices already or else why would they even have them, so it seems an update might be useful.

I can remember using them like 10 years ago…

Thinking about it a little more I bet it is very difficult to legally define a product type.

They manage to do it for sales tax.

They could go by whichever the product itself shows most prominently, or require both units if 2 units are shown.

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