can we have someone lobby to fix the ridiculousness of immeasurable unit pricing
Example
Paper Towel and toilet paper for example
28 cents per 100 Sheets vs 38 cents per 100 Sheets
what it a sheet or piece? its not a metric measurement like millilitres or grams
it is being abused by sellers to undercut the competition in a dishonest way particularly online where supermarkets dont typically show the sheet sizes you need to rely of the picture and its tiny fine print (that is also subject to change without warning as per their disclaimer)
Another unit pricing anomaly. 3 popular mass market BBQ sauces appear side by side in the same search, same shop. 2 are labelled in ml and unit priced by ml and 1 labelled and unit priced in g. All similarly sized bottles.
Equating 1 ml to 1 g (correct for pure water) is not always right on depending on the product.
Selling liquid BBQ sauce by weight and being an outlier doing so; would it be an obfuscatory ka-ching?
It would seem reasonable that liquids should be labelled in ml and solids in g, and mandatory to do so even if the other measure is also shown (ref English and French labelling in Canada, or metric and US imperial although optional in most jurisdictions).
Yes. It definitely makes it harder. I have encountered the same problem in the supermarket i.e. attempting to estimate the density of some fluid - and, no, the density of water at 4⁰C (and standard pressure) will be a poor approximation, as you say.
However there is a division of labour between
the manufacturer - who decides whether to label their product by volume or by mass, and
the vendor (the supermarket) - who produces the unit pricing piece of paper
What is a liquid though? What viscosity of liquid, usually due to the presence of other material in the liquid, that is to say that the product is a combination of a liquid and a solid, would qualify the product for being sold by mass?
I know you said “BBQ sauce” but tomato sauce is sold by volume despite being quite viscous while similar purees may be sold by mass. Flavoured mayo sold by volume but mustards in jars sold by mass and curry pastes sold by mass.
Sounds like an administrative nightmare to me. Harkens back to a certain famous question as to whether there will be GST on a birthday cake.
Another solution (controversial) would be to require everything to be sold by mass. End of. That would not be difficult to administer - but would require a lengthy changeover period. Mass is somewhat more definitive than volume.
The downside of that proposal is that it would invalidate a whole lot of existing recipes. If the recipe calls for 250mL of cream but cream by law is now sold by mass, I’m going to need a converter. (I recognise that you wrote that another measure could also be shown but that sounds like a recipe, ahem, for confusion and error.)
