Financial criteria are important to you, but you don't go grocery shopping with calculator in hand. Pity!
You're faced with two tubs of strawberry yogurt. The products are quite comparable, except for one detail. One 650g tub is $2.99 and the other 750g is $3.29. Which is the better price?
Cereal aisle, beverage aisle... the same puzzle every time! At checkout, it's impossible to know how much you could have saved on your order if you'd been able to compare prices.
By clearly displaying the price per unit of measurement, a retailer provides you with objective information that can help you make significant savings.
Demand that your retailer displays the price per unit of measurement!
Price per unit of measure is a consumer tool that first appeared in the United States in the late 60s. Its main purpose is to facilitate price comparisons between similar products offered in different formats.
From an arithmetical point of view, it is simply necessary to relate the price of a food to a basic unit common to all these foods, be it grams, milliliters or any other relevant unit of measurement.
So, in this example, yogurt B turns out to be cheaper than yogurt A, albeit by a small difference of $0.02/100g, or about 5% less.
With the multiplication of formats, it's increasingly difficult for consumers to objectively compare the price of two similar products. For example, at the IGA, a 1.5-liter bottle of Monclair water costs $0.79, while a 1-liter bottle of Evian water cost $2.79. If we compare their prices per unit of measure (Montclair = $0.05/100 ml and Évian = $0.28/100 ml), we see a price difference of 560%. The table gives other examples for staple foods such as oatmeal, jam, juice etc.
Commercial practices associated with price labelling fall under provincial jurisdiction. In other provinces, there is no obligation to display price per unit of measure. In Quebec, this type of information must be affixed to the shelf label associated with a product, when the product price is not displayed directly on the product.
The framework for displaying price per unit of measure dates back to 2001. Details can be found in the Consumer Protection Act (art. 223) and its regulations (art. 91.4 and 91.5).(Relevant extracts)
In short, establishments that sell food (such as grocery stores, pharmacies and convenience stores) and that do not indicate the price on each product (unit marking of products), must display a shelf label near the product containing a certain amount of information, including the price per unit of measurement. In fact, the shelf label makes it possible to dispense with the obligation to display the price on each item.
About 1 in 4 Canadians find it fairly or very difficult to compare prices on similar products. Young people, newcomers and seniors have the most difficulty.
About 6 out of 10 Canadians know or have noticed price-per-unit labels.
Canadian consumers who have already noticed the price per unit of measurement are less influenced by sales.
Our sample is made up of 1001 Canadians from all regions of Canada, with diverse socio-economic profiles. Respondents are randomly selected adults interviewed between December 10 and 16. Percentages are calibrated to be representative of the composition of the Canadian population in terms of age, gender and place of residence. Calibration was based on data from the last census in 2006. The margin of error for such a sample (n=1001) is ± 3.1%, 19 times out of 20.
We evaluated the shelf labels of food retailers in Quebec and Ontario. Generally speaking, shelf labels have a number of weaknesses in terms of legibility and intelligibility, and could be improved to make it easier for consumers to understand the information.
In Ontario, unit pricing is sometimes used, but much less systematically than in Quebec.
On several occasions in Quebec, we have observed practices that do not comply with the Consumer Protection Act and its regulations(Complaint filed with the Office de la protection du consommateur (OPC, Quebec) against seven retailers, February 16, 2011).
What's more, the spirit of the law, which is to enable consumers to easily compare the prices of similar items, has not been respected either.
The first label shows the price per unit of measurement, the second does not.
These labels contravene the Consumer Protection Act.
And what about this label
or this one?
When designing labels, some retailers choose to include information that is not intended for consumers, but for their employees. When consumers are presented with a label containing information that may or may not be intended for them, they have to make an effort to analyze and interpret it.
An important principle of message clarity is the relevance of the information. According to Céline Beaudet, an expert in readability, "readers won't make the effort to understand a written text if the information presented is of no value to them. By drowning out the information reserved for the merchant, the label producer undermines communicative effectiveness. He wants the reader to sort through the information, and this effort is harmful". A good label will minimize the presence of information that is useless to consumers.
A good label groups different types of information together, avoiding mixing different types of information.
Advertising logos have no informative value. It distracts attention instead of directing it towards information that is useful to the consumer.
The price per unit of measure must be expressed with a certain precision, but beyond a certain threshold, this precision becomes irrelevant, or even confusing. For example, a retailer may decide to display a price per unit of measure of $1.4975/100g or $1.50/100g. To avoid confusion, retailers should place the appropriate symbols next to the price ($ or ¢) and next to the unit of measure (e.g. ml or g). The symbol avoids any inaccuracy.
We recommend that the federal and provincial governments take steps to make price comparison easier for vulnerable groups, such as the young, the elderly and allophones. To achieve this, they should make it mandatory to display the price per unit of measurement for all prepackaged foods.
We recommend that, in the short term, the federal government adopt guidelines for the practice of displaying price per unit of measurement, with the aim of standardizing it and maximizing its impact.
We recommend that the base unit used for display per unit of measure for similar products be harmonized within the same retailer.
We recommend that discounted products also display the price per unit of measurement.
We recommend that the Office de la protection du consommateur pay particular attention to merchants' compliance with the Act and its regulations on unit price display, and take appropriate action in the event of non-compliance.
We recommend that the Office de la protection du consommateur specify by regulation the basic units to be used when displaying the price per unit of measurement.
This dossier is the fruit of research into price display by unit of measurement carried out between 2009 and 2010 by François Décary Gilardeau, agri-food analyst at Option consommateurs.
