Grocery Shrink Ray Gun Hits Stash Tea

Posted on September 8, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

The Stash Tea Company should be ashamed of themselves.

I stopped into the grocery store to buy my wife some tea… thought I’d get the “organic” tea cuz you know, organic means better, right (sarcasm intended). Then I noticed the organic, while priced the same as regular tea, is an 18 count box and not 20. Those 2 fewer tea bags translates to an 16% price increase, and although the products are technically a different SKU it still falls into shrink ray gun territory because Stash Tea company explicitly chose to decrease the quantity as opposed to increase the price for the organic.

It actually gets worse when you calculate the pricing off the net contents. You will notice in the attached picture that the net contents are 18 grams in the organic version versus 38 grams in the non-organic. What that means is that the company has decreased the amount of actual tea by over half in one, while suggesting it’s the same price as the original product. Actually, according to actual product volume, the organic version is 111% more expensive than the non-organic original product, or put another way that box of tea is really $8.42 on a unit to unit basis when compared to the other Stash Tea product.

I complained to the store clerk, who looked at me like I was from another planet (a planet where people do simple arithmetic, apparently).


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