>all groceries are mandated to list price per weight/volume/appropriate other unit so you can find out, say, which bag of rice is cheapest per kg, for instance - the same goes for taxi services and price per km
That's actually really interesting and I had no idea that was the case. In a supermarket, would such a list be in the isle next to the food? Or would it just be available from management or something like that?
I don't know about Sweden but here in Germany it's on the price labels that are attached to the shelves.
You have a price per unit. Say a 0.5l bottle of beer costs 0.78 EUR and then you have the price per 100ml or 1l below it (1l = 1.56 EUR). It's marginally useful if you compare the price of rice to the price of Coca Cola but it's really useful if you want to know what's cheaper: Buying a package of 6 1.5l bottles of Coke or buying a crate with 18 0.33l bottles.
We do this in the US. However, not being standardized on the metric system, it can end up being pretty useless. It's usually good, but every so often you come across something like:
Item A: $3, $6/pound
Item B: $4, $0.30/oz
Which defeats the whole purpose of the per-unit price. Occasionally drives me bonkers.
It would normally be right next to the price of the item itself on the shelf (usu. in smaller font). Here are some examples I found via google images. [1] is an example of a tesco shelf label. [2] is an example of why having this extra info available is useful for consumers (and some of the bizzare tricks that consumers still fall for)
Not Sweden, but the UK (and Germany) have the same thing.
Usually, they just tell you on the shelf's price tag:
Bigger Font: 1.50€/£
Smaller Font: 0.75€/p per 100g/100ml etc.
That way, you can see that sometimes it makes sense to buy 2x 400ml ketchup (just as an example where I had it recently) instead of 1x 800ml, simply because 2x 400ml is actually cheaper.
> That way, you can see that sometimes it makes sense to buy 2x 400ml ketchup (just as an example where I had it recently) instead of 1x 800ml, simply because 2x 400ml is actually cheaper.
That applies to plenty of dastardly stuff too e.g. the big 3-5kg pots of Nutella you see around Christmas? The unit price is often twice that of the standard 750g pot.
No, you will have to compare the individual products yourself. But since products of the same type is usually on display close to each other, and the price is displayed in the same unit, it's not very hard. In practice, this means that most products have two prices listed - first, the actual price of the product, second the "comparison price", per standard unit. For example:
Brand A, Orange Juice, 1L. 19.90 (Price per Litre: 19.90)
Brand B, Orange Juice, 2L. 30.00 (Price per Litre: 15.00)
This is simply to spare the consumer of doing the math themselves, which can turn out to be quite tricky in some cases (although not in my example:)
the small price on the rack sticker next to the big price is the price per unit. I have seen that in Connecticut, Vermont, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Norway. Actually pretty much every grocery store I have been to in my life.
I've seen this in the US, too. It's on the labels, typically listed in price per ounce/fluid ounce for smaller items. Maybe it's a local law (Los Angeles) because it's that way at every super market I go to.
That's actually really interesting and I had no idea that was the case. In a supermarket, would such a list be in the isle next to the food? Or would it just be available from management or something like that?