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Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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If only smart glass is as popular as mobile phones. When Google introduced their smart glass, I dreamt of a day when a price history overlay is displayed when looking at a barcode, like how Keepa is doing for Amazon.
I also like German price display which has effective price, as in Eur per liter for drinks, making it dead simple to compare products. A smart glass will make it available everywhere.
Back to Carrefour, I really like that they are pushing pro consumer actions. However, we all know too well that they won't do the same when it's their products which are shrinking. Still better than no action though.
Afaik the base price display is requiered by EU law, atleast Czechia got them too on my last vacation.
it's so good too, you can cut through all the bullshit and simply check if per kg/liter It's cheaper or not.
even though for a lot of stuff it's simple math. 100g you just 10x, 250 you 4 x the price, 200g you 5x.
but there are lots of stuff that's packaged in weird amounts. 230g yogurt, 180g tofu.
you don't want to break out the calculator for shopping.
Your comment made me realized that displaying the price per kg is not a standard everywhere.
This is the only price I'm looking at when doing groceries.
Same for me, I got so used to it.
The only annoyance is when (mostly brand) stuff is purposefully displayed in a different unit (e.g. washing powder in washing loads instead of kg). But imho that kind of obfuscation speaks for itself...
Works for basic ingredients, but for even basic "preprocessed" items (mixed nuts, pizza, sauces...) they can just change the recipe, put more of the cheap and less of the good stuff. The cheapest product per weight often has a worse quality. Sunflower oil instead of more healthy alternatives etc...
i mean you can buy whatever ypu want that's not really relevant to the price/kg(/l)
there are plenty of products that are identical but have very different pricing
Price per litre / kg etc is in Australia too
It is but it does nothing to curb shrinkflation in my experience.
I'm trying to think of a way to mandate this kind of notification but I can't think of a way to do it that could be both clear and mandated. Perhaps if the price per changes there needs to be a history listed on the label.
One big problem with it is that in the short-term it discourages sales, so groceries aren't incentivised to do it except as a stunt like this, so they won't want the notices to be prominent. Ultimately they still want you to buy the stuff because then they make money.
I think a price most recently changed date next to price per unit would be great.
Yeah I mean a price per unit history over the past X period, at least a year if I had my way, so if it changes a lot you end up with a clear list. That's actually not bad. Over time people would learn to read it and be educated about it and there might be more public pressure against it.
USA has unit prices as well. Can’t imagine shopping without that.
Wait a decade and AR might be popping off
Google said that a decade ago…and it was said the decade before that…
I don't really know what google has said, I wasn't really referring to them, but AR is plenty used in industry already.
There's just some way to go left for consumer use, but we are getting there. 5G networks are also supposed to help our with the possibility, due to their increased capabilities.
Consumer grade AR is being worked on, and it is expected to become a big thing eventually.
I was referencing Google Glass, which was Google's attempt to make a consumer grade AR, a decade ago. They also said that they would have Glass commercially rolled out within the decade. It failed, not for any technical reason, but because it looks stupid and it makes everyone around the person using AR feel awkward. It was universally ridiculed online, has no use case and it has no consumer market. As you said, it only has uses in industrial applications, because factory workers don't have to care about fashion or aesthetics in general in their work place. But people are already uncomfortable with everyone having a camera and microphone in their pockets at all times. Now imagine that every single second of your day was potentially recorded, sent back to Google, analyzed, used to train an AI, minified to tailor ads to manipulate your behavior, which would be easy because you have a screen glued to your eye 24/7 already; and also potentially having it all shared with authorities without your consent, along with the faces and data of every single acquaintance and stranger you interacted with without their consent…yeah, that doesn't sound like another step in the privacy dystopia we live in already.
But Apple is making the Vision Pro now, I'm sure a couple million of gullible consumers will shell out money for that. And maybe the AR era will finally come to us.
Those are all technical reasons though. Aesthetics are limited by the technology. And the glasses calling home more than it should is also a technical and regulatory reason.
It can absolutely be done while sidestepping all the concerns. Or better yet, have glasses running FOSS software.
But sure, those concerns are reasonable, but they are not fundamental to the technology itself, but to our societal reality. That stuff won't get fixed by avoiding technology, only by societal change. And you can be sure that all kinds of stuff will be pushed into people if that societal change doesn't happen, no matter whether it's AR or not. (Just look at the recent trend of enshittification of everything).
Pick a lane, is it “limited by the technology” or are concerns and limitations “not fundamental to the technology”. Both statements cannot be true at the same time.
AR, just like VR, have problems for which the technological solutions are either not physically possible in reality as we understand it, or the practical solutions completely nullify any cool factor the technology has to offer, or the price to overcome them is so high that they would never be financially feasible to become a commercial product. Like other futuristic fantasies like flying cars, and holographic interfaces, they sound cool in paper, are shit in reality.
I was referring to the concerns about privacy. In addition, when I say "to the technology itself" I am referring to AR in its ideal form.
..also XR technologies are absolutely technically feasible. They're not even that extravagant these days. The fundamentals are in place, and used.
They are technically feasible, but not in their ideal form. You keep equating their ideal form to their real form, and that's just a fallacy. The real XR technologies do not make good consumer products. The real XR that exists today that are in place and used, are in industrial settings, not in consumer electronics settings. And they might never come out of there because their ideal forms, don't exist. No matter how many technological strides you make, you still have a goofy crystal glasses or bulky 1kg of crystal and silicon in your face, that will make you sweat and strain your neck in under an hour. That limitation will never go away, for it's already at the tail end of physical possibilities.
Saying that XR technologies don't make good consumer products is weird considering consumer VR products already exist and are used but alright.
..and why do you think that AR glasses have to be at least 1kg in weight?? That's like saying laptops (or smartphones for that matter) will never be a mainstream product because nobody would want to lug around a 30kg machine. The smartphone I'm typing this on already weights just 150g.
We are still quite far from the limits of physics, and there are plenty of upcoming technologies which will allow to reduce weight.
I was referring to VR. Let's just agree to disagree.