So, I do a good amount of my grocery essentials shopping at Save-a-Lot, mostly since it is on the direct path home from work…
I started buying my yogurt there some time ago: it was very tasty, at the time only the strawberry had HFCS, and it was an eight ounce container priced at two for one dollar.
A short time ago, the container shrank down to six ounces, still two for a buck. It didn’t bother me much except the initial noticing of it; I mean, I still get two snacks for a buck, so no big loss…
And it still doesn’t bother me, but now I am noticeably more confused…
I looked into the labels again and noticed that the strawberry no longer has HFCS. And then a week ago, the price lowered to thirty-nine cents a cup. Let me break that down…
Originally, the yogurt was two eight ounce cups for one dollar, which breaks down to 6.25 cents an ounce.
Now, it is one six ounce cup for thirty-nine cents, or 6.5 cents an ounce.
And they removed HFCS from one flavor and replaced it with the more expensive ingredient of sugar. And they changed the cup size, and therefore had to recast molds and change packaging design and the foil stamping for the lids… All of this for the increased price of 0.25 cents a cup. That is one extra cent for every four cups… One extra dollar for every four hundred cups sold.
I do hope they sell an awful lot of yogurt…
Does this speak of how impossible it is to raise a price above such a rounded amount as two for a dollar…? How silly we are as consumers.
On a tangentially related note: I have started noticing a lot of moments when it is cheaper to buy two smaller packages of a product instead of buying one package holding exactly twice as much. This never used to be so when I was growing up…
It all makes my head hurt a little bit…
gryphon's hole 