I know pop has the sugar tax on it now? Does cereal?
Comment on Walmart math: Wrong price per ounce
orclev@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Even if you round up to 17 cents per ounce that’s still only $5.44 for 32 ounces. Doing the math backwards they’re charging a bit over 21 cents an ounce.
KC_Royalz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
orclev@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I got curious and looked it up. I couldn’t find anywhere in the US that taxes sugary cereal only drinks, and even if they did the highest rate I found was 2 cents per ounce (tangent, it’s completely idiotic that they tax by weight instead of taxing by sugar content) which is significantly less than the markup in this case. It was a good theory, but unfortunately it doesn’t check out.
herskal@lemmy.world 1 week ago
My guess is they’re incorrectly basing it on the 40oz size (which does exist). Buyer beware!
orclev@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The math on that does seem to line up rather perfectly but that raises the question of if the ounces on the label are wrong or someone copied the wrong line item when filling in the per ounce price (not that they should be doing that manually, it should be derived automatically from the price and weight). I suppose they also could have copied the wrong weight as well so the label says 32 oz, but the item is listed in their DB as a 40 oz product.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Why isn’t it automatically calculated. It’s 2026. Surely we have metadata for products on lock by now. If the tag has the volume and the price, it has all the information it needs.
bss03@infosec.pub 1 week ago
Having worked on POS software, I can guarantee you we do not have “metadata for products on lock”.
Manufacturers will sometimes reuse the same UPC even though the packaging is fairly different. The UPC doesn’t contain the price, size, or any size – it is just a convenient look up for whatever POS the retailer uses, and for systems targeting independent retailers, that might be maintained mostly manually, though some warehousing associations might provide and importable list.
In large retailers sometimes the smart tags are controlled using a system that doesn’t even deal with UPCs, just images / webpages, shelf locations, and schedules.
Buyer beware, indeed.
Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
It’s probably 32oz with 8oz free!