No, they are better for the environment where their use is possible, as they have many charging cycles before they need replacement. This compares to single use alkaline batteries which can’t be recharged or reused. They are only worse if one doesn’t recharge them, and uses them as a single use battery.
They are readily recyclable. They can be placed in battery recycling bins which can be found close by. For nearest locations, see
Brendan
Paying attention to the unit price of grocer products can greatly help people during this cost of living crisis. So i thought I’d remind people of this by sharing the following current example of how unit prices can vary greatly within and between retailers . It relates to brussels sprouts. OK I know they are not everyone’s favourite green veggie, but we love them and buy them every week when they are available.
At Coles a 400g pack cost $17.25 per 100g, 74% more than when sold loose for $9.90 per kg. A pic of them is below . At Aldi a 500g pack cost $10 per kg. I could not see any loose ones there.
Spotted recently … the mass on the shelf ticket was incorrect, and hence the unit price, although correctly calculated, was also incorrect.
“UP Vigilante” whipped out pen and phone (calculator) and fixed it up. 
At aldi onions are cheaper by the pre pack netted bag but loose, are dearer. I prefer loose buying. I suppose many other things are the same.
Yes of course. The point I am making is that many, if not most, AA batteries are used in devices which do NOT cut off before the batteries go flat. When this happens the battery can be ruined, or soon will be. So you do not get the multiple uses you wanted. Thus there is no saving in resources or dollars because they are a lot more expensive than alkalines and use more environmentally problematical substances.
No, they are worse when allowed to discharge too far and fail, either immediately or after a few uses. This occurs all the time in the many devices that do not have low voltage cutoff circuitry. Most toys, old style torches including cheap LED torches, clocks, remotes etc. The problem was worse with NiCads and old style NiMHs because they have high self-discharge and would go flat quickly even when not in use.
Rechargeables are environmentally and financially advantageous only when you get many re-uses. As above, many devices do not allow this in practice, so if your device does not have lo-voltage cutout, you are better off with single-use alkalines.
I’m not seeing that in practice. I have zillions of devices using removable rechargeable batteries, many older, some even with NiMH batteries (I think the last of the NiCds have been retired). They all regularly go flat. If I were getting only one use or a few uses of the batteries, I would have noticed very soon because I would be buying new batteries all the time - and I am not.
However this may have digressed from unit pricing!
As I said, it depends whether the device declared the battery flat, or the battery was actually flat. It also depends on how long the battery is left flat, and whether there is one battery or a more than one in series. I’m glad you have no problem.
I find it infuriating when supermarkets use unit pricing but not the same units. This photo shows one example of so many: I challenge anyone to compare prices across these products. Some are priced per 10g and some per 100g (and there’s possibly other variations in there as well). How is anyone meant to figure that out?
You can move a decimal point one way or the other to multiply or divide by ten. So $104 per 100 g is the same as $10.4 per 10 g.
Thanks, yes, I’m aware of that.
Possibly something for Choice to take up with the government.
I don’t know what the legal requirements are at the moment but obviously, in the extreme, unit pricing could be rendered completely unviable if a given supermarket chooses a different unit mass for each product, never mind about choosing a unit volume for some other comparable products.
Making it easy for small business and harder for consumers?
As with many of our ‘protections’ customers can advocate but when it is not in the interests of a business and there is friendly legislation what are the chances? Might be good, or not.
Customers can also advocate with the government to reduce the threshold floor area down from 1000 m².
The intent of the current regulation is to protect small, independent stores from being burdened with requirements that a much larger competitor (e.g. an Australia-wide chain like Colesworth) can more readily meet.
That intent made sense decades ago when Colesworth had access to mainframes in head office and the small, independent store had nothing (would have to calculate unit prices by hand). Obviously the world has changed in the ensuing decades so that even a small, independent store has ready, affordable access to a range of computer technology (including subscribing to online product data sources).
So is the current floor area threshold still fit for purpose?
Even our smaller IGA store is part of the digital revolution for stock ordering and management. Ours also uses printed price labelling. Some on prepackaged is applied by the IGA central suppliers along with bar code. That the shelf price labelling is no longer hand written but now with barcode matched numbers on many labels suggests the technology likely has the ability to also show unit pricing. No more than flick of a switch (option setting) in the software used to print out the shelf pricing.
Similar might be asked of the convenience choices attached to the local servo or 7eleven. Most seem to use bar code scanning as an aid to more efficient use of the operators time, and no doubt to assist with stock management. Although the choices if for milk, bread or soft drink can hardly be considered good buys if buying cheapest is a priority.
If there is an exception for the future it might exclude the local F&V which sells milk, eggs and all sorts of supposedly healthier grocery lines as an aside. If a store has bar code scanning and printed shelf labels - no exception to unit pricing. It’s likely already built in.
Indeed. I would be happy enough to exclude servos but they are probably already excluded by virtue of the other condition mentioned in the article.
Probably. (If the shelf label is printed, it has likely come out of a computer, and if it has come out of a computer and it exhibits the sell price then there’s a good chance that it could exhibit the unit price too.)
But let’s just have the government put out for discussion a reduction in the floor area threshold from 1000 m² to 350 m² and see what industry says. (That might still exclude servos anyway.)
Who remembers meto guns? 
This has annoyed me for awhile. In this case it is easy to do the unit conversion however the item listed first is not the cheapest. It is deceptive or lazy either way it should be fixed. The item pictured is not the only item I have found with this issue.
Might be confusion or misunderstanding the
Vanilla possibly would be classed as a flavouring essence. Under the code, if it is, the unit price to be displayed is $/10mL.
If it isn’t classed as a flavouring essence, the unit price to be displayed would be $/100gms.
Irrespective of this, such discrepancies can easily be rectified by including a statement in the code that the same unit pricing must be used for every product in the same product category. Currently it is an option or considered best practice.
It should be - but the example that you show is probably a data issue rather than a software issue.
Regardless, you will need to report it to Woolworths if you want it fixed. If you get pushback from Woolworths then you can direct them to the table that @phb gives you, if you can find where that came from.
I would urge you to go ahead and report it to Woolworths.
There’s a bigger picture problem here though. The Woolworths app search logic is “wild and woolly” so that it brings up all sorts of unwanted products (deliberate?). So “sort by unit price” is not going to work properly when products from different categories come up. It could be argued that if products from different categories come up then “sort by unit price” should be disabled.
In the specific example posted here, I was able to avoid that problem by filtering by product category so that only, you know, vanilla essences came up.
It is from the guide, which is available through the link in my previous post.
Whoops. Yes. Sorry.
