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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was legislation in place that sets legal standard sizes; for one, it would allow for more uniform packaging, allowing reuse between brands and reducing trash. It would be more predictable box / pallet sizes, reducing transport costs. And it would give consumers more security, even with the mandatory price per liter / kilo notices which are often hard to read.

One example of shrinkflation / cost fuckery here is cheese. We buy a kilo of it every time, but they've changed it so you get e.g. 920 grams. Looks the same size, but it's slightly different, thus hard to make comparisons. Still up 30% since before the Ukraine thing though.

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You can already shop at Aldi if you like things to come in standardised sizes.

(I love Aldi! But I think such regulation would be pretty silly. But we already have such regulation in many parts of the world for many goods. Eg publ in the UK can't just sell you 500ml of beer, they need to give you a pint.)

Germany used to have that legislation, removed in 2009. Legal packaging sizes were e.g. 100g, 250g, 500g, 750g, 1000g.

Removed because it was, unsurprisingly, not the lowest common denominator EU wide. It's almost universally considered a tragic loss, I guess the only exception are those whose job description includes getting creative with packaging size.

They still have legislation that you have to prominently display the 'Euro per 100g' price? I consider that good enough, and packaging size should be left to the customer.

(The old rule had lots of exceptions and loophole anyway. I remember that fresh yeast almost always came in little cubes of something like 42g, because that's a convenient amount for baking. And no one had any problems with that.

Do you really want bureaucrats or politicians to decide on arguments about what odd sizes are convenient enough to warrant granting such exceptions?)

However, I do remember shopping in Britain, where Tesco would give you the mandated unit price for one kind of apple per piece and the next box over with a different variety of apple would give you the unit price per kg. British supermarkets were a bit customer hostile like that. (I noticed them get a lot better when Aldi and Lidl really took hold in the UK. Especially those confusing '5-for-3' deals etc got much rarer.)

> I wish there was legislation in place that sets legal standard sizes;

Those extracting profit from deceptive packaging would do better to extract a moral lesson from the provenance of the baker's dozen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantage_loaf

As sibling comment said, I think this is bound to cause unintended side-effects. I think it would be simpler to require per-unit pricing alongside overall cost, and regulate that amount. Nothing more frustrating than seeing a per ml or oz cost on one item and a per-count cost on one right next to it.

In France, there is always the price per unit. And since the units are not in grain of barley nor a game of guess work (is this ounce dry or wet today?), it's obviously much easier to compare.

Isn’t this a European regulation? In any case, it is obviously a good thing for consumers and it is difficult to argue against this.

Not sure if it's EU-level regulation, but many EU countries seem to have it.

At my Kroger, almost half the times I try to compare unit price bergen two products, the units are different (e.g. $/oz or $/lb or $/g). And these are always products right next to each other on the shelf.

I noticed that at Tesco in the UK as well (but that was ten years ago), they also mixed GBP/piece into the mix.

Enforcing legal standard weights/sizes for everything that businesses cannot deviate from would be ridiculous... and that wouldn't reduce inflation, either.

List the price per litre or per kg, for instance, for every item in addition to the item's price and people can then compare between different brands on the shelf. This is already done in many cases though I do not know if there is a legal obligation.

People are not stupid by the way, they notice when an item they are used to buy shrinks.

> This is already done in many cases though I do not know if there is a legal obligation.

Many countries have such legal obligations. Details obviously depend on jurisdiction.

I've been saying this for ages. There are so many second-order benefits. For example in Japan, books are virtually all a standard size, and so bookshelves are built to match. Lets you fit more books in a small home.

When packages are random sizes and always varying, it's impossible for anyone in adjacent industries to develop synergies.

As a customer you can already refuse to buy books that do not come in your preferred standard size.

Be wary of engineering society as you would a machine. You don’t know which efficiency you’re destroying in favor of whatever efficiency you may or may not be getting.

A grocery story where all the isles are filled with identically sized boxes full of standardized products sounds pretty depressing, for one thing.

If you regulate packaging sizes it’ll just cause unintended side effects, like weird fillers in your food.

what, like all of the palm oil that's now in chocolate?

Even with unregulated sizes, Amazon’s boxes contain mostly filler. (I wrote Amazon, but it is common for other online stores as well).

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