Unit Pricing: Comments sought on a draft international standard

Happy to post the containers to you if you want them. no need to ask at the stores if you don’t want to. Let us know if you want them mailed either through Choice’s mail address or to an address you want to provide us.

I agree. Selling loose products without info about the weight (and not providing scales for use by consumers) greatly reduces price transparency and hinders value comparison. Same applies to prepackages of products like F&V sold by number, some of which (if the total is less than 9) do not even have to indicate the number of items in the pack.
Unless consumers complain about this and participate in the review of measurement law it will be difficult to get change.

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Good that you mentioned bunches and bunch size.It tends to get overlooked when we are looking at price/value transparency issues.

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Many thanks for the offer, but not necessary at the moment (but please keep them) since i am going to be away for a few weeks. Will however still try to look at Woollies tubs and prices in a bigger store before I go.

BTW even though the volume of these tubs is not displayed to the customer, the retailer is still required to fill them to the top.

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One thing that has not been mentioned is the variation in size of fruit and veg sold by the each. It is high time our scientists bent their GM skills to design the standard avocado, rockmelon and cauliflower. There has to be standards in this world and too many people are getting away with murder by taking advantage of so-called natural variation. You ought to be able to walk into a shop anywhere in the world and know that a cabbage weighs 1.345 kg (except for the USA where it will be 2 3/16 of a dry quart). We can do it and we must.

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I agree that this is an important issue and I mentioned it thus in my recent reply to meltam:

Selling loose products without info about the weight (and not providing scales for use by consumers) greatly reduces price transparency and hinders value comparison. Same applies to prepackages of products like F&V sold by number, some of which (if the total is less than 9) do not even have to indicate the number of items in the pack.

FYI in some countries products which here are usually priced per piece, eg cabbages, are sold per kg. So it is possible to have a better system, but will be hard to change here.

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Simpler to standardise the cabbages.

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Not sure I agree. The variation in the weight/size of F&Vs is always going to be great due to differences in variety, growing conditions, time of picking, etc.
Also, very tight grading standards can result in much product being wasted.

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Not permitted, GM them to be identical, grow them in moulds, pick on the same day. If the Chinese can make their citizens homogenous it is child’s play to do it with cabbages.

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Would that not be cruel? Do cabbages feel pain?

More on topic, when it comes to expensive fruit it is so often sold by the each or count. Never by weight? If we choose the more humane approach, rather than torturing our fruit or veg to conform, would selling it by weight would be fair to all?

The ones that stand out for us are Avocados, Mangos and Passion fruit. I’ve seen the last mentioned for 75c each previously. It made me wonder if our home grown ones that were twice the size would sell for $1.50?

What ever the marked price, it is near impossible to reliably compare value for these products between different retailers. And when you select one or more, do you choose the largest and heaviest to maximise the value?

Would it need just one small recommendation from the ACCC? And one simple legislative action, to mandate sale by measured weight?

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Mark
The ACCC has no jurisdiction over whether or not products can/should be offered for sale by reference to a measurement, the measurements used, etc.

The ACCC just administers the grocery unit pricing regulation which in practice only applies to unit pricing of products sold by grocery retailers in fixed measure packages.

The agency responsible for measurements is the National Measurement Institute (NMI), part of the federal Dept of Industry, Innovation and Science and the most relevant area to what we are on about is TRADE MEASUREMENT.

The Dept has just started a review of all measurement laws and has issued this discussion paper on measurement based transactions

There is also a high level online survey

So, there is now an opportunity for consumers to have their say on most of the measurement issues we have raised here e.g about how products are offered for sale and priced.

The consultation closes on 31 May

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