We had a recent discussion here about weird grocery store pricing, in which some knowledgeable people came in and said ‘yeah, when the store’s selling one unit for $2 and five for $3, the point of the pricing is to try to make the five-unit look cheap, not necessarily to make you pay a steep price for the one-unit’
This is kind of like that, but with a wrinkle.
Doing my food shopping the other day, and I needed a bit of celery. These were my options:
Whole celery - $3.90
‘Trimmed’ celery - top half with the leaves cut off - $3.50
Bagged celery pieces - small - $3.90
Ok, so far so comprehensible. Clearly if you have space in your fridge, the whole celery is your best option, and they don’t really want you to buy the small, which is a whole bunch of processing for them, unless you’re willing to pay a steep premium for all the chopping and bagging
Here’s the wrinkle - both the cut sizes were marked with a weight. The SAME weight - 300g. This was very obviously a blatant fabrication - they were right there next to each other! The medium size ‘trimmed’ one was clearly worth at least two of the small ones. In fact, when I bought a trimmed one and weighed it at home, it was two and a half times its stated weight - 750g by my scales.
So … there’s laws against selling underweight goods. But as far as I know there’s no law against selling goods that weigh stupidly more than their posted weight. However, I’m struggling to see what the point is here. There are per-weight prices posted as well as total price, and drastically underestimating the weight of an item makes its per-kilo price look bad - so that sounds like they’re trying to influence shoppers away from the middle size one. But it’s the least-cost item! So that looks like they’re trying to influence shoppers *towards *the middle size one.
I am confuzzled. What was the point of that mislabelling?
Almost certainly a mistake. I’m guessing that they also (sometimes) have a smaller size of trimmed celery available, and the stocker mistook the larger size for the smaller one. Or maybe when they were printing out the labels, they didn’t weigh the trimmed ones at all, and the machine defaulted to using the last thing they weighed.
If it’s a mistake, it’s a big one. This is them. It’s industrial-scale packaging which would be sent out from a central warehouse to every store in the country - not a dude out the back of a the shop with a tagging-gun
I agree with the others that this is probably a mistake but there is at least one more option. It could be that it’s not worth the store’s time and labor cost to be more precise. As the employees are bagging up the ‘medium’, trimmed bunches, they just need to worry about making them look neat and keeping the weight above the posted spec. Taking the time to bring the trimmed weight down to specific, narrow range (300-350 grams) might be viewed as time wasted. It could well be that it’s perceived as being more efficient to do a quick and dirty trim, complete the job quickly and move the employee onto other duties.
It’s also worth noting that trimming the heads down to 300 grams would generate a much larger amount of the small pieces which would have to be weighed, bagged, sold if possible and possibly discarded as unsold or sold at a loss. Where’s the value for the store here?
That bolded bit is where we’re having the disconnect, I think. I’m as sure as I can be that this product was not packaged by ‘employees’ of any sort - it was machine processed. There’s a central processing plant somewhere that’s churning out some-number-in-the-thousands of these each day, into pre-designed bags whose size, shape and marked weight were decided by a marketing department six months or two years or whatever ago.
Put it this way, if you bought this in the pasta aisle, and discovered when you got home that the bag held over a kilo of macaroni wouldn’t you be just a touch surprised?
Fresh celery and dry macaroni are quite different goods. While celery does keep rather well if it’s kept refrigerated, it is perishable and will be unsellable much quicker than the macaroni.
I agree with elbows that in all likelihood, the trimmed celery are the same bunches as the whole celery, but the tops had wilted a bit so they trim them to make them more appealing. Same with the short sticks. Yes, that does mean a bit more processing, but the cost of that processing is negligible compared to the sales price. The markup on produce is high as the store has to throw away what doesn’t sell. Same for the distributor.
Look at it this way. If, in the setting up of the trimming and packaging machine, they determine that the smallest bunch of celery they have will weigh 300 grams when trimmed, they run them all through and package them in 300 gram packages. That is cheaper for them than pulling off stalks from each bunch to get closer to the 300 gram weight, and they don’t have to deal with all the stalks they pulled off. What doesn’t make it into the package is waste, so they might as well make the packages heavy and customers will feel they are getting something extra.
The macaroni is different. It does not spoil as quickly. The producer can adjust the packaging equipment to get as close to the 500 grams as they can to be sure they are not going under (and they probably have a tolerance for how much they can be under). The closer they can hit the 500 gram weight, the more bags they will fill and the more they will sell, since they won’t go bad if they end up with more bags than they need; they can just save them for th next order. The markup for the macaroni, I suspect, is much lower than the celery (as reflected by the prices, $2/Kg for the macaroni, $13/Kg for the celery).
Labels can be very wrong. Here’s the label on a package of chicken. Weight: 1.63 lbs, price per lb: $6.98, price for package: $11.38. Looks right.
Just below, in the shelf edge, is the price label for the same product and size. Price per ounce (shown twice): $6.92. That would make a 1.63 lb package cost $180.
In the same display were some similar labels, and some that had the correct price per unit.
I pointed this out to a store manager, a department manager, and 2 employees over a month, all of which promised to fix the error. Two months later, nothing changed. (Wal-Mart)
Likely that the weight of the trimmed celery is a minimum weight and not the actual weight. Each bunch of celery is going to have a different weight and it would be cost prohibitive to weigh each bunch and custom print a bag.
So they just print what the minimum weight would be so they are not selling underpriced goods and let every bag say the same weight regardless of actual weight.
For the celery pieces there is much more flexibility and they can approximate the average weight to be much closer to the minimum weight.
I agree with elbows. What makes you so sure that they were not repackaged in-store? If I was a produce manager and the end bits of the packaged celery from the produce supplier started to look a bit tired; instead of throwing them out, that’s exactly what I’d do. Have some employees take them off the shelves, trim off the bad bits, repackage, and sell as “already trimmed for your convenience celery and cheaper too!” If the trimmed celery was packaged on a styrofoam tray with a clear plastic wrap and label, I’m almost 100% sure that’s what they did.
The links weren’t working for me before, but they are now. But I suppose the same plan can be carried out at the supplier location - how can we sell this celery with blemished ends? Cut the bad bits off and package as sticks. Previously unsalable celery can now be moved. Or perhaps it was a pricing/labeling mistake, but the former seems more likely to me.
I don’t see any reason why those links mean the celery couldn’t be repackaged at the store/wherever deliveries come from. There’s absolutely no reason I can see why the chain could not provide each store/warehouse with a stock of bags preprinted with a description and weight and have the store staff repackage celery as it starts to turn. It’s not some dude in the store tagging the bags as 300 grams when it’s really 750 grams - but there’s no reason it can’t be some dude in the store putting 750 grams in a bag that should hold 300grams.
I didnt work grocery, but I ran into more than my share of “how do we optimize/recover value from this damaged/discolored/opened product” I’m gonna third or fourth elbows on this. Its what I would do if presented with that problem.
You might be shocked at the kind of packaging capabilities many grocery stores have these days. With the mass propagation of service delis and in store bakeries many stores are very well equipped for mass packaging/repackaging.
Many a “this is gonna go bad soon” bag of potatoes has made its way into the potato salad bin in the service deli.
Next time I go shopping I’m gonna take a pic of the actual display and show you.
This is one of the ‘big two’ supermarkets in the country - probably serves the needs of about a quarter of the population of Australia - and they have a substantial online-selling business. All three of the sizes - full, trimmed, pieces - were displayed in substantial quantities, in set aside areas of their own. It’s definitely a central distribution situation. It has to be - otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell this size of product in the online store
(I suspect some of you can’t see the linked images because the website is detecting your American IP addresses. I have the same problem with SNL links. They’re all still there for me)
The ‘big two’ are kind of infamous for the (excessive) regularity of their produce. I don’t think there was more than 10% variation in the weight of any of the bags (of anything, not just celery) on display. There were about a dozen or so ‘cut’ bags, and maybe 30 or 40 ‘trimmed’ bags, all undetectably close in size and weight to each other.
I did used to work in the produce section - actually, at that same chain - as a student. I know what the ‘crap, gotta sell it today’ packaging looks like. It’s not that.
I just wanted to say that’s some expensive celery! $3.90 AUS is about $2.75 USD, which is WAY more than a bag of celery is around here. That’s like .99 cents worth. Is there some level of importation, or is the vast majority of Aussie produce in-housed due to perishability versus shipping things across an ocean?
