Wanted: An Accountant for Woolworth's; or Misadventures in the Produce Section

I do most of the grocery shopping at a Woolworth's. And occasionally I find things there that befuddle me (not just kangaroo cat food, vast displays of Vegemite, and tinned beetroot slices). Specifically, I see some very very strange pricing strategies.

For example: Last week I was looking to score some regular onions - us Americans call them "yellow onions," while Aussies say "brown onions." Clearly the International Onion Association needs to convene a meeting to help standardize names for onions so we aren't all confused. For example, here they call what in the US is known as a "green onion" as a "shallot" or "eschallot," and what we Yanks call "shallots" are called by the Aussie greengrocers "French eschallots."

But back to my yellow-brown onions. They have them loose sold by the kilo, and in bags. Last week a one-kilo bag of yellow-brown onions sold for 89 cents. The loose ones were 99 cents per kilo. And the two-kilo bag of yellow-brown onions was $3.39. I stood there and studied the bags and loose onions closely. Same regular old run-of-the-mill onions. Equally fresh and nice looking. Packed by the same company even (the bagged ones). But Woolies was charging nearly DOUBLE the per-weight price for the bigger bag, in complete contradiction to the normal pricing routine of a larger unit of a given good being cheaper per weight than a smaller box, bag, or carton. So I bought the one-kilo bag.

Similarly, they had plain old carrots, conveniently also called "carrots" here in Australia (unlike capsicum -- see the end of this post for the American name for these) so no confusion. Usually in the US at least, produce that is sold prepackaged in bags is cheaper per weight than produce sold loose. Apples are always that way, for example. Well, these carrots were $2.25 for a kilo bag. And they were $1.98 per kilo, sold loose. So I bought the loose ones.

It's not just produce. I carefully studied two different bottles of Ocean Spray cranberry juice. The one-liter size was $4.59. The 1.5-liter size was $6.99. In other words, again the larger size was more expensive per unit than the smaller.

This isn't just one week's pattern either. I see this sort of thing at the Woolworth's I shop at all the time. So I can't tell you for sure whether there is just one mathematically-challenged store manager setting prices, or whether the entire Woolworth's chain is screwed up. But they might try advertising for an accountant. Or a mathematician. Or for that matter, an averagely-bright 10-year-old with a calculator.

Capsicum? What we Americans call a bell pepper. One of the few things cheaper here than in the US.