And it would probably be more expensive to get precision-calibrated equipment to get you at the bottom end of the tolerance to save product cost than what it would cost to just aim for the correct value with less precise equipment.
This one is a conspiracy theory I struggle to get behind. It seems like the conspiracy would be less profitable than the “proper” behavior here.
You know full well that they did some statistical analysis and determined the minimum possible amount of pasta that they could try to put in that box, taking into account variations in their machinery and moisture content.
Big “How much can a banana cost, $10?” energy here.
We’re talking about one of the cheapest brands of commodity pasta here. Think about how much effort you are implying the company put into this versus what 8g of major wholesale flour costs – the only cost they’d really be saving in this conspiracy.
Even at consumer retail prices that’s, what, $0.012 per box? And I bet wholesale prices are at least an order of magnitude less than that. Is the maybe tenth of a percent of cost savings worth a potential class action lawsuit and the horrific pain of Discovery that comes with it? And does that maybe tenth a percent of cost savings even come close to covering all the additional production costs involved in having that machinery calibrated so much more precisely? The juice is not worth the squeeze, my friend.
You think you’re arguing that they would do evil for profit’s sake, but you’re actually arguing they would do evil for evil’s sake even at the expense of profit.
Just so that I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying a company that sells tens of billions of dollars of pasta per year is not interested in saving a penny ot a fraction of a penny per box?
Do you think anyone is going to win a class action lawsuit against a pasta company that 1-5% of the time puts just barely too little pasta in the box. You think we’re going to have that kind of righteous justice? Haha. Do you think people would even be that surprised given that, as you say, “we’re talking about one of the cheapest brands of commodity pasta here.” No, if this was found to be true, whatever regulatory agency would just give them a warning.
It’s not about being evil, is about the way capitalism works. If they’re putting more product in the box than they have to, they’re fools.
And you don’t “precisely calibrate the machinery.” You just figure out what the variations are and you set it to the minimum. If you’re supposed to have something like 9-11 oz of pasta in your box and you know that your machine will give you whatever you set it to, +/- 0.2 oz of pasta, 99% of the time, you set your machine to 9.2 or 9.3 oz. You don’t set it to 10 oz.
4.7 billion is Barillas global revenue, that’s a lot for one person but for a multi-continent good distributor it’s not.
I know you’re angry at the worlds injustices and all but I don’t think the bargain brand dry pasta company is the source of a part of your global conspiracy
I’m not angry and I don’t think this is a global conspiracy. I just believe that large companies are motivated to cut costs wherever they can.
Have you heard of pink slime? Its a product of the beef industry. They heat and centrifuge “waste trimmings” to get a little bit of additional gooey fatty animal product and then add it to ground beef. It’s pretty gross and it adds only a miniscule amount to the profit margin.
Large companies do everything they can to make as much money as possible.
oddly, that’s just over 8g, the difference noted in OP’s example. so, OP’s package is within he allowable tolerance, just.
And it would probably be more expensive to get precision-calibrated equipment to get you at the bottom end of the tolerance to save product cost than what it would cost to just aim for the correct value with less precise equipment.
This one is a conspiracy theory I struggle to get behind. It seems like the conspiracy would be less profitable than the “proper” behavior here.
You know full well that they did some statistical analysis and determined the minimum possible amount of pasta that they could try to put in that box, taking into account variations in their machinery and moisture content.
Big “How much can a banana cost, $10?” energy here.
We’re talking about one of the cheapest brands of commodity pasta here. Think about how much effort you are implying the company put into this versus what 8g of major wholesale flour costs – the only cost they’d really be saving in this conspiracy.
Even at consumer retail prices that’s, what, $0.012 per box? And I bet wholesale prices are at least an order of magnitude less than that. Is the maybe tenth of a percent of cost savings worth a potential class action lawsuit and the horrific pain of Discovery that comes with it? And does that maybe tenth a percent of cost savings even come close to covering all the additional production costs involved in having that machinery calibrated so much more precisely? The juice is not worth the squeeze, my friend.
You think you’re arguing that they would do evil for profit’s sake, but you’re actually arguing they would do evil for evil’s sake even at the expense of profit.
Just so that I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying a company that sells tens of billions of dollars of pasta per year is not interested in saving a penny ot a fraction of a penny per box?
Do you think anyone is going to win a class action lawsuit against a pasta company that 1-5% of the time puts just barely too little pasta in the box. You think we’re going to have that kind of righteous justice? Haha. Do you think people would even be that surprised given that, as you say, “we’re talking about one of the cheapest brands of commodity pasta here.” No, if this was found to be true, whatever regulatory agency would just give them a warning.
It’s not about being evil, is about the way capitalism works. If they’re putting more product in the box than they have to, they’re fools.
And you don’t “precisely calibrate the machinery.” You just figure out what the variations are and you set it to the minimum. If you’re supposed to have something like 9-11 oz of pasta in your box and you know that your machine will give you whatever you set it to, +/- 0.2 oz of pasta, 99% of the time, you set your machine to 9.2 or 9.3 oz. You don’t set it to 10 oz.
4.7 billion is Barillas global revenue, that’s a lot for one person but for a multi-continent good distributor it’s not.
I know you’re angry at the worlds injustices and all but I don’t think the bargain brand dry pasta company is the source of a part of your global conspiracy
I’m not angry and I don’t think this is a global conspiracy. I just believe that large companies are motivated to cut costs wherever they can.
Have you heard of pink slime? Its a product of the beef industry. They heat and centrifuge “waste trimmings” to get a little bit of additional gooey fatty animal product and then add it to ground beef. It’s pretty gross and it adds only a miniscule amount to the profit margin.
Large companies do everything they can to make as much money as possible.
Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence.
5/16 oz out of 5 oz is just over 6%.
Thank you! I don’t get why they use such weird measurements. Why not use %?
Probably because, as evidenced by most others’ attempts to do simple arithmetic in this thread, percentages are even more difficult to calculate.