Monday, June 02, 2008

2 grams

Yeah, about one tenth the weight of a soul. Apparently that's also the weight of the thin plastic bag you use to keep the fruits in the supermarkets.

A couple of hours ago I was visiting Safeway supermarket and buying some fruits. Before paying for the fruit, I weighed the mandarins at the scale which gave me 915 grams. But when I went to the cashier, although his scale also registered the weight as 915 grams, the receipt only printed 913 grams. Apparently they very smartly deducted the 2 grams for the plastic bag. I am pretty sure it's not due to equipment inaccuracy as the smallest unit for the scales are 5 grams; and this was the second time I observed the same thing in Safeway.

If you are about to give Safeway a round of applause... Hold on. In order to save at least 5 cents from this deduction, the fruit must cost more than 25 dollars per kilogram. And as you might have guessed - nothing costs more than 25 dollars per kilogram in Safeway.

But at least they were kind to have thought of the plastic bag's weight. :D

Image Credit: Inhabitat

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

haha. corporate image. when Starbucks highlights its participation in environmental friendly projects, I wonder what their actual intention is (or rather, strategy) :P

YP

changyang1230 said...

Haha yeah you are probably right. Corporate image. It took me a serendipitous discovery to find out that "good image" though, so I don't think it has done much good for its image in the majority of the customers.

You have Safeway in UK too right?

Anonymous said...

nope. no Safeway here (i think).

Selfridges and Marks and Spencer sell high quality stuff, followed by Sainsbury, ASDA etc. The cheapest is Tesco. No Tesco around my area, quite pissed off. Marks is planning to charge for plastic bags I think. Corporate image? haha. Well, better than doing nothing.

YP

changyang1230 said...

Haha but when I checked wikipedia it says safeway is an UK company? Eerm.