Trickflation
Trickflation
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27121839
Trickflation
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27121839
Prices go up up up Never come back down down down
The invisible hand job economy
I mean it sucks and I drink coke (it's my mix for booze) but it's a welcome change (price increase). Soda pop should not be drunk as frequently as it is by people and anything to make it less common is a welcome change IMHO. If becoming more cost prohibitive to people makes them drink it less that's not a bad thing
Now the challenge becomes, because America is becoming a 3rd world shithole it's possible that coke is the only safe drink because thanks to the EPA being gutted over decades water isn't safe in many areas due to contamination. That's not cool.
Not only do they cost more, the greater surface area means your cold drink warms up faster.
Neat.
Greater surface area also means more material for the same product, which leads to less effective transport, more waste and increased polution. Non-standarized can size means every can storage system and cup holder which have taken can size into consideration will be worse. I'm sure a lot of vending machines will have to be modified or scrapped for this can design.
Everyone are worse off because of this, and it's all for attempting to trick consumers and increase profits. Shit sucks.
Is this a new thing in the US? We've had these in Europe for years - and I mean 10-15 at least.
Hey we get this revolutionary super can which is supposed to keep your beer cool.
The ribs are supposed to reduce the contact area of warm fingers.
It doesn't work obviously since they aren't big enough and skin on fingers are flexible enough to touch everything.
You only pay 30 to 50% more for this nonsense.
Everyone tries to avoid them but somehow the normal cans are more than often 'sold out' in stores.
😂
Quick 'proof' the taller the can, the more material used:
Consider two cases ignoring the top and bottom only focussing on the surface area. In the first case, you flatten so much the can has no height. This forms a ring that when unwrapped makes a length of 2 pi R.
Now stretch the can to be 'infinitely' long. By construction, this is longer than 2 pi r. Given both are made of aluminum, and have the same density, the larger can has more mass requiring more material.
The total mass must be a continuous function ranging from the linear mass density times the circumference of the circle to the same mass density time times the 'length' of the infinite line. This must remain true for any small increase in length between the two.
I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader. What if the circle has an infinite radius?
Isn't the larger the can proportional to how does both top and bottom shrink? like, being the same amount of material, but with a different distribution.
No he's right. The solution for an optimal surface area to volume ratio is a sphere. The farther you deviate from a sphere the less optimal you become. The actual math for this is finding deltaSurfaceArea in respects to cylinder radius for a given volume and then finding the maxima, which is a Uni physics 1 problem I really don't feel like doing. Long story short, optimal is when height = diameter, or as close to a sphere as a cylinder can be.
Dickflation.
Where is the one on the left no longer available? I live in the US and see those all the time.
Just straight up stop buying shit. Drink filtered tap, and live off only what you need and shrug off ppl that think buying expensive shit will make them cool.
A lot of the world can’t just drink tap water with a basic filter
How do I fit my coke addiction in your filtered water?
Also stop paying for filtered tap water when there's nothing wrong with your specific tap water.
I meant use a brita or something
Just a heads up Brita filters do basically nothing it's mostly just a carbon block which will help remove chlorine flavor which makes it taste a little better but in terms of actually removing contaminants it does very little to almost nothing.
Zero water is the closest thing in brita drip form that actually removes things but getting a counter top reverse osmosis is the way to go if not getting a dedicated under sink unit
People with vending machines aren't going to be happy, those new ones won't fit.
As a consumer you should have thought about the consequences of your habits. Because of you they now have to replace all the vendig machines.
Its the consumers fault. Companies have absolutely no responsibility.
Huge /S if there ever was any doubt.
The liberal media wants you to think that the two volumes of liquid are equal using their woke science, but if you use your common sense, you can clearly see that the narrow tube is filled higher and therefore contains more liquid. There is nothing wrong with the economy, real Americans just need to use narrower glasses. Checkmate, leftists. /s
Yes! I love this comic (well, I guess it wasn't originally) and reference it all the time. I was randomly very curious which shot glasses we own are the biggest and was trying to use this as an example because we have some tall skinny ones and short fat ones. "You know! The thing where kids think the tall one is bigger??"
This is Piaget's conservation of volume test. I did this experiment at school (we went to the elementary school next door and ran tests on the kids). Most of the kids said the higher one held more liquid because it was 'taller', though some said the short one had more because it was 'fatter'.
Babe, wake up. New shit corpo practice just dropped.
I'm surprised the new one isn't something less than 12 ounces.
Good enough reason to boycott coke products, anyway.
Good enough to contact one's consumer organizations or government watchdogs.
So that's why they changed the shape. I saw no valid reason so I just assumed they were trying to evade taxes in some way. I'll admit I have no idea how much anything I buy at a convenience store costs.
If anything the taller cylinder will use more aluminum for the same volume, so they're kinda shooting themselves in the foot here with aluminum and steel tariffs, lol
Seems pretty clear the only reason for this was to change the price without as many people noticing.
The tall cans have more surface area. It does mean slightly more materials (but not that much because the can thickness is not uniform), but also more visibility in vending machines and stores. It's a purely marketing decision.
This is over a year old and completely made-up.
I'm not sure of the shape change reason, but I prefer the thinner cans. I have a candy store with soft drinks and I can put more of the thinner cans on the shelf. Usually one more can per shelf.
Fun fact, a taller, narrower can uses more aluminum!
It's definitely more surface area per volume, but a 200 vs 202 lid and a smaller hermetic seal cancels some of those losses. Sidewall is cheap aluminum wise, but you're likely right in that it's a little more aluminum. Definitely costs more to make since they do fill a little slower.
Also fuck coke, what a bunch of assholes
I thought it was the other way around. The thickest part of the can is the top, followed by the bottom. The sides are much thinner. I thought the reasoning behind switching to tall and narrow cans with the same internal volume was to save on aluminium.
The top seems to be the same size, the old one just bulges more while the new one almost goes straight down.
The tops are the same on both
A few years back we literally had frito lay vendors come in before store open to reset the chip aisle, all the bag sizes shrank and they credited out the previous size.
You know, this should only trick young kids as they genuinely believe taller = more. The fact that it probably tricks a ton of adults just suggests their critical thinking never made it past adolescence and we should be very concerned by that.
There's a book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" that talks about a bifurcation of the mental process between intuitive mental work and deliberative work. It goes through a bunch of examples of people with established credentials, careers in intellectual professions, and proven records of deliberative thought being tricked by relatively casual visual and verbal illusions.
Getting tricked by Tall Can isn't something you can "Critical Thinking" your way out of reflexively. It is something you have to exert continuous mental energy to achieve. When the overwhelming majority of your decisions are made reflexively, and even the process of stepping over from reflexive intuition to deliberative intuition is ultimately an intuitive process, you're going to get fooled more often than not. The only real defense is to intuitively train defensive behaviors, and that doesn't avert being fooled so much as it averts falling for the most common scams.
In the end, a handful of marketing flacks can consistently outwit any audience, because they can knowingly engage in a campaign of strategic deception more easily than you can reflexively catch every deceit thrown your way. What you need is a countervailing force. A regulatory agency dedicated to imposing transparency at the barrel of a gun can render calculated deceits more expensive to implement than they return in revenue.
But the "lolz, just don't fuck up" mentality is what leads to people getting gulled at industrial scales. You're not going to outsmart the professionals and its painfully naive to think otherwise.
You know, this should only trick young kids as they genuinely believe taller = more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger?wprov=sfla1
Adults in Murica are just as dumb and unneducated
Essentially all of America's problems are because its population is so uneducated. We want simple answers to complicated questions because that's the best we can hope to understand. 52% of us can barely read at a 6th grade level FFS. The ignorance then allows us to entertain some pretty dark thoughts leading us to Trump.
This doesn't really have anything to do with critical thinking, it's just that our brains work on estimations and approximations, although experience can balance it out.
Try this: draw a martini glass (inverted cone), and draw a line where you think it would be half full.
It will be wrong. Numberphile - Cones are messed up (YT)
That's more an argument in semantics. Developmental psych actually has this as a brain development stage, with the later stages being about critical thinking even if the earlier phase doesn't seem so. Experiments were done where children of various ages were tested on benchmarks such as volume and kids under a certain age failed almost universally (I forget the age, something like 5 or 6) in the same way that infants lack object permanence. Later, at 9 and around 13 (?) the same framework argues that the brain gets basic and advanced problem solving and critical thinking, although even that theory admits plenty of people skip that last milestone.
Your point is more a common logical (sensory?) fallacy that plenty of adults fall into, but isn't necessarily the same thing. At least, I think it is, I'm a bit busy right now to check and it's bad enough I'm typing this out instead of taking care of my own toddler, lol.
People who bought cola before won't stop anyway. That has little to do with the shape
How much critical thinking is going on in a supermarket? Anyway, the tall ones also warm faster 😡
Oh good point, another downside of the taller shape. More surface area = warms faster and uses more aluminum.
Critical thinking (or at least reasoning) is everywhere, even when people drive or do chores, an ounce of thoughtfulness at the very least makes a difference.
And yes, warm soda. Lol
The fact they kept the lid the same size probably helps the deception, especially once there's no old cans to compare it to. This could actually work out to be a good thing if people buy fewer sugary sodas while thinking they're drinking about the same
It surprises me none at all that a significant market share of an American brand are stupid enough to fall for it.
Makes me remember a study where conservatives fall for internet scams at like a 3x higher rate than everyone else lol
surely this uses more aluminum
It may use less aluminum, as the top and bottom surfaces are much thicker
I'm shit at math, but probably not? If both contain the same amount of liquid, are filled to the same point and both are round (which they are lol), I don't see how those would require more material.
And even if, if they double the price per can, it's absolutely worth it.
I found this same thought on this same post a year ago. Someone already crunched the numbers and it seems with the volume constant but height growing, the surface area increases
Original discussion: https://lemmy.world/comment/8371055
To illustrate, imagine if we kept getting taller and taller - like trying to fit the same volume of soda in a pencil-thin can that's about a meter long.
You use more and more aluminum the further away it gets from the minimum surface-area-to-volume container, which would be a sphere
The fuck is a fluid ounce?
Common mistake. Its actually Florida ounces.
Ounces that are wet.
Damn liberals and their woke-genderized measurements smh
...two-thirds a dram of scotch whisky...
1/8th of a cup
About 4.835 micro cubic fathoms.
This cannot be a real question.
Because everyone on Reddit is American? Or that the entire planet is supposed to understand nuanced differences between ounces and fluid ounces that only... what, 3 countries on the planet use?
chant with me
dont
buy
american
I mean we're not buying this stuff any longer but I'm surprised coke seems to be more expensive in the US than it is in Denmark?!?
Welcome to the world, m8! :,-)
I think this falls under the term "merchandising", which includes "family size" or "party size" things that cost more per ounce than regular size.
yeah but also that's too much coke. 355ml? jesus, are you eating lava wtf do you need that much sugar water for
People drink 64oz of that stuff in a day like it's nothing lol
That's a standard sized drink can in pretty much all of North America. Anything smaller is rare/unusual (though occasionally available).
we have 330ml standard, but i find that a lot too. 250ml is pretty common too, I used to drink those before I quit buying them.
*High fructose corn syrup water
I had 500 ml of an energy drink. I wonder what you have to say to that.
Damn, 123% rise.
Who cares. Stop drinking soda that shit is awful for you.
If you’re dumb enough to consume this shit all the time then you’re exactly the one who is being fooled at the same time.
Hmmm careful with the slippery slope of victim blaming
You should care cause its not just soda, its everything. companies just your exact reasoning to justify it.
This attitude is a huge problem, and is exactly what the billionaire class is wanting.
By pitting you against a group of people you clearly look down on, it stifles your ability to care about a real issue, which is that the ruling class is taking advantage of your peers. You don't think of them as your peers but they are, since you are both the working class. Even if you are a multi-millionaire, you are much, much closer to being someone making minimum wage than you are to a mutli-billionaire. Hell, even if you were a billionaire you are closer to being someone working minimum wage than you are to a multi-billionaire.
Plus, if they get away with this now, they will do it for something you actually do use eventually, and no one will care about backing you since you were an asshole when it wasn't effecting you. This is exactly what the billionaire class wants, all us peasants squabbling at the bottom, grandstanding and hating on each other for no reason, while they get to sit at the top, unscathed.
I haven't bought any American brands for the past few weeks. Surprise surprise, my intake of soda and candy and unhealthy stuff has fallen like a stone.
If you really have to drink it, drink the zero versions of most sodas. Dr Pepper in particular has some really decent flavors without the gross aftertaste. Pepsi zero is also really good. Just stop drinking regular soda. We have the technology to make diet taste good now so use it.
You're only a victim if you get victimized. Stop buying from companies that do this shit.
Weird what happens when 40% of the currency was printed in the last few years.
Are we blaming the government who control interest rates, gamify the CPI to depress inflation, and who control the corresponding new money supply that drives up the price of basic goods?
If housing, gold, and crypto are any indication people have far too much money than they know what to do with. You'd have to be a fool to not accumulate some cantillon effect for yourself when you're government is throwing money away.
"shitflation"
This is a terrible meme
It has two red circles and bottom text, of course it's a meme /s