441
What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?
(programming.dev)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
441 points (98.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43944 readers
876 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
That's true to a point. 50% gas by fill level is ridiculous though.
What is the company's incentive to make the package bigger than it needs to be?
Shipping costs come two fold... Weight and number of pallets. Weight change is negligible here, but the amount of air they need to ship will increase. They are incentivized to reduce it to a minimum to save on shelf, storage, and distribution costs.
They're also incentivized to keep the same size packaging (both for logistical and public perveption reasons) and ship less product in those packages. People are willing to pay $6 for a big bag of chips, despite the big bag weighing 150g less than the normal bag 5 years ago.
They don't get paid by the gram, they get paid by the bag. A bigger bag looks more impressive, and thus can be sold for more. Same for those tall skinny beverage cans. They look bigger than the regular cans, but are actually 25ml smaller, and yet go for a similar price.
This will continue until the price per gram is what people look for (emphasis on this at the point of sale would help), or the mass of each product is standardized. 50g, 100g, 200g, 350g, 500g, 750g, and whole kg sizes only, none of this 489g nonsense.
I don't agree with the can example. Those are physically smaller and lack meaningful slack fill.
Your points stand for the first purchase. After that people will know the proportion of chip to air, and be annoyed by it. If they could do a bag smaller with minimal chip breakage and less air they would both succeed at getting more bags out per pallet and be lauded for not cheating people by selling air.
The slack fill is functional, and I don't see much incentive to over do it.
You underestimate how little people think when purchasing things. None of this would be a problem if everyone looked at the price per 100g first, but ooo 3 $5... And then the size reduction usually goes alongside a packaging change, like jumbo or family size; "New look, same great taste!". It's all a distraction, out of sight, out of mind and all that.
Also, the 330ml cans are taller, and because of the square-cube law they only need to be a little skinnier to be smaller. They're also not usually displayed next to the normal 355ml cans. Out of sight...
Also, who is going to laude a big corp product for a logistics change in the first place? I barely see anyone complaining about shrinkflation for packaging reasons as it is. I'd see a better slack fill level on one product and think, "This must be old stock" or "This is the last time we'll get bags this dense".