Even in today’s modern society, it’s quite sad seeing grocery stores not adjust their prices according to what they’re selling. Fortunately for us consumers, it means better deals. I’ll give you an example. A couple of days ago, I went shopping at Wal-Mart. I was in the mood for a snack, so I went into the snack aisle and took a look at the selection there - my eyes gazed over to a bag of Munchies (a sort of trail mix containing Rold Gold pretzels, Doritos chips, Sun Chips and Cheetos cheese puffs).
There were two different sizes of the Munchies bag - a 300 gram bag and a 150 gram bag. But this is where it gets incredibly stupid and anyone with half a brain would realize the difference. The 300 gram bag was priced at $3.99. The 150 gram bag was priced at $1.49. Now do you see it? Rounding the numbers to make it easier to explain, the 300 gram bag is essentially $4.00, whilst the 150 gram bag is approximately $1.50. Why would I buy the 300 gram bag for $4.00, when I can buy two of the 150 gram bags (which equal 300 grams) for $3.00? So I bought two 150 gram bags and relished in my 25% price discount.
A few weeks ago, I encountered the opposite situation. I saw a 450 gram bag of chips at $2.99 and a 250 gram bag of chips at $2.49. Obviously, I took the 450 gram bag because of the price differential.
That’s why whenever you visit any grocery store, you should take into consideration the different sizes and prices of the item you’re buying. But perhaps grocery stores implement this sort of price trickery on purpose in an attempt to deceive their customers. Think about it for a moment. These days in high schools, teenagers purchase snacks from vending machines with prices far higher than those of the same item in the grocery store. The reason? Convenience. Instead of walking all the way over to the grocery store to buy a chocolate bar, the company is betting on the fact that the average teenager is willing to spend almost 100% more money to purchase the same product in the school.
And the sad part of this all? It works. Teenagers fall victim to vending machine prices. I saw it first-hand when I attended high school these past 4 years. Companies get richer. Our society gets stupider. Unless of course we educate our generation on avoiding these obvious financial traps.
