This is especially annoying when you realize that ever brand is different. There will be seven different brands of coffee in identically-sized bags, yet one may have 5.7oz of coffee and another will be 12.8oz.
Is it possible they are trying to sell for the same price but with wildly varying costs of each varietal of coffee? I.E. they want to sell a bag for 15 bucks across the board but some beans cost them far more than others to source?
Up to some value of volumeDelta * productCount it actually makes sense to use the same container due to sourcing/manufacturing cost from the variance so I wouldn't say purely disingenuous, there is real reasoning behind some of it... it's just marketing gets in the way of when you should actually add that second container size i.e. it's costing you more to always use the bigger container but the marketing department says the increase in sales due to confusion outweighs it.
Because demand curves don't work like that unless you have a highly inelastic good. With normal goods keeping quantity constant as price changes puts you on a suboptimal point on the demand curve. Coffee's price certainly hasn't been inelastic and changing can size at every spike would have netted you decent production cost increases instead of savings: http://www.aboutinflation.com/_/rsrc/1368022029715/coffee-vs...
The varying of quantities in the same sized container is not the problem and is certainly not illogical. The problem is when we allow marketing departments to lie/cheat/fool the product onto a different portion of the demand curve instead of letting the $/amount naturally flow back when price decreases or when it makes sense to switch to cheaper containers.
Because it pays, and for some reason not many people have the guts to say marketing is rotten to the core, and advertising is cancer on the society. Maybe because the market encourages it structurally. Lying costs little and yields good profits, so acting immorally gives competitive advantage.
This is why I prefer buying bulk when I can (with reusable containers/bags [1]). Bulk Coffee + airtight/cool storage hasn't resulted in bad coffee for me.
Why put up with deceptive packaging?
[1] Yes I know that most of that product came arrived in even more packaging, but doing what I can for now.
I guess what I am learning about myself lately is that I have the power to lie to people and convince them to do things they don't want to do or don't know better.
People know this about me. They know it almost instantly. I sense it in them.
I sense the same about other people. They have that power over me.
However, I make an effort not to. Or, when I do, I work especially hard to steer them in the direction of their goals or somewhere that will benefit them. Even if it's at my own expense sometimes and that can be sad or disappointing.
And so, through that, I have come to resent people who don't think that way. Who think, "People won't look at the number of ounces in the can, they'll just see it's the same size and think they're getting the same amount."
It's a lie. Deception. It's wrong.
But yet, we allow it in society.
It's destroying us. It's all around us. Fake news. The US President. Marketing. Stack Overflow.
So, why put up with it? It's not that you even know you're putting up with it. Some of us do. Most don't. Scammers proliferate.
It's more like, How do we protect the innocent people? Why as a species, do we allow some of us to prey on others?
I stand with you here. I recognized something like this myself - I phrase it as "I want to live in a world of cooperation, of win-win deals", but there are still people who prefer to exploit others, play "win-lose" games.
That's why I despise the advertising industry so much. They're all playing win-lose games with society, and the collateral damage slowly eats at the base of what keeps our societies together.
Yes! I remember someone asked me one time, "What do you want?"
I said, "I want to create synergistic relationships with other people."
I despise advertising too, but I realized I have to advertise so people know about my products. There are people who want them. Advertising helps them find my products that solve their problems.
And then I realized the advertising platforms like adwords and such were also deceptive. So I stopped advertising.
It doesn't help me though or the people who I could help if they knew.
Like almost all big problems of our times, this too is a coordination problem.
When everyone around you shouts through a megaphone, you need a megaphone too just so that the person next to you can hear you. If someone took all megaphones from everyone at the same time, people would have the ability to finally have a conversation.
Advertising currently is this. It's oversaturating our attention. Of course, for a market to function, you need a way for people to know what's available to buy. If done honestly, it's totally fine, and I don't have anything against it. My beef is with the existing industry, with all the things I've mentioned here[0]. I want someone to take their megaphones away, so that we could talk to each other like human beings.
I'm interested in your thoughts on one public policy example of this. Back when AIDS first hit, the community of scientists and public policy makers said that while it was starting in the gay and drug community any moment it would hop into the general population. They knew this was a lie, but told us this because they didn't believe Americans would spend money helping gays and junkies.
I've come to understand that to varying degrees a lot of public policy works this way.
I don't think that was even a lie - disease doesn't respect tidy social boundaries of guilt and innocence. Especially with unscreened blood at the time.
Yeah, I don't think it was a lie either. It was an expectation about the future. We worry about diseases jumping demographics all the time, sometimes even from one species to another.
Thank you for saying that. Conditioning on this being accurate information, I just lost that much trust in the community of scientists.
This is how "hacking" the public policymaking fucks up society. And then people are surprised antivaxxers are a thing. They are a thing because we're all being constantly manipulated, and some people just don't have the capacity or patience to separate the truth from bullshit.
WRT. "the community of scientists", I was just parroting the expression the comment I replied to used. I primarily meant medical reporting and its public policy implications.
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world.
The key part is "minus the nausea-inducing sleaze" except that their behavior of late is exactly nausea-inducing sleaze.
>Atwood was bothered that the community doing all the work wasn't getting paid...
Yet, the contributors to the stacks don't get paid either. Now the creators and VC are trying to sell the stacks and make money -- exactly what he said his competitor was doing and shouldn't be.
> He and Spolsky decided to create an ad-supported free alternative, and released all answers under a Creative Commons license, so that the users could use the content elsewhere if Stack Overflow ever shut down or started charging for subscriptions.
Now they've decided to retroactively change content users created for them to their benefit.
> we will continue forward under version 4.0 of the CC BY-SA license. This change encompasses all Subscriber Content as described in our ToS including data dumps as well as any content previously made available by Stack Exchange under the terms of version 3.0 of the CC BY-SA license.
