![]() Bergen shared a story he heard recently from his father-in-law. (Marielle Segarra/Marketplace)Īnother possible explanation for these odd numbers? Downsizing. Endless varieties of cereal … in different box sizes. And since only about a third of states require stores to post labels that do the math for shoppers, that usually means you’ll look at other things when you buy the products, like quality or brand or your past experience, he said. So sometimes they choose odd quantities and weights to make that calculation harder. “What you’re most likely seeing is something we call the ‘ difficult comparison effect,'” said Mark Bergen, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.Ī lot of big packaged goods companies don’t want to make it easy for you to compare their products based on price because they’re not the cheapest option, Bergen said. But marketing experts have some other theories, too. Part of the reason could be practical - when you combine shelf size, box size and the weight of certain foods, you can get odd numbers. We asked SC Johnson, which makes Ziploc bags its PR team simply said the company makes packages in different counts to meet “various consumer needs.” It’s hard to know a particular company’s reasoning, because these decisions are made behind closed doors. One more plastic bag in this box, half an ounce more olive oil in that bottle. in math, because many of the same products come in seemingly random quantities and weights. Have you ever stood in the grocery aisle, frozen, unable to decide which loaf of bread or box of cereal is the better deal? Maybe you wished that you had a Ph.D. Supermarkets are filled with this kind of weirdness: 19.4 ounces of dish soap, 11.5 ounces of coffee. “If they just gave me 20, I wouldn’t have thought about it.” Nineteen baggies? Why the weirdness, Ziploc? (Marielle Segarra/Marketplace) “Which just feels like they’re cheating me out of a bag,” Chang said. On a recent trip to the supermarket, Chang noticed something in the baggie aisle: a box of 19 Ziploc bags. “So they become like a squishy toy for the kids. “ “My wife’s done a thing with, I think it was, like, corn syrup and dye and putting other things in there,” Chang said. They have three kids and a habit of using baggies for everything - snacks, crayons, Legos. Eugene Chang and his wife, Jenny, live in California.
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