Chocolate Pricier than Gas! Buyer Beware

I was going to write about Clarion tonight but I was caught by a little pricing/promotional thing today. London Drugs, here in BC and Alberta (no idea if it's farther east) tends to have fairly good pricing on items and has, besides a pharmacy, an A/V section, and a small food section of dry goods.

Chocolate bars is a big seller as they have one row devoted to them. I like my dark chocolate but tonight I was looking for soup. London Drugs likes to put their big red and yellow signs on certain spots that say "Another Super Low Price" or something very similar. So these signs are as thick as measles down the chocolate bar row and you think, oh good, a sale.

Not so. The dark chocolate Lindt bars that were running between $2.69 and $2.89 are now $3.49. Those regular low grade milk chocolate bars that you buy on a short whim, and which only run a dollar or more in a 7-11 or a Mac's are now the super low price of .99. It seems all of the chocolate bars have gone up twenty to thirty cents. That's a lot. Hmm, why is that?

Oh, there it is, the super new low price for a super small chocolate bar is .79 cents. Super small because they're called thins. Thins? Yes, not because you're being chintzed out of a chocolate bar for a higher price but because they are handily small and only will cost you 100 calories. What a laugh. Did they have to ship these in on the backs of an extinct species before trucking them for miles on gas guzzling Hummers?

It really made sense when I was at the checkout and they had a package of four Cadbury Thins for only $3.99. Now let's do the math here. The average chocolate bar is about 45 grams and let's say it does cost a whole buck. So four of these thins come to 110 grams as it said on the package. A quick calculation shows that it's not quite the same as two and a half chocolate bars. If you were to melt this back into 2.5 chocolate bars you'd be paying about a buck-sixty for each one.

Wow, Cadbury, that's a good scam. I mean, sure, make smaller chocolate bars so that those of us who want to watch our diet can eat less. Oh, but package four together to make them more resistible and then double the price. Cadbury may not have been the only one that has done this, but it was the noticeable one. And I thought I saw some of these "Thin" chocolate bars at 19 grams, not the 27 that would be one quarter of 110 grams.

That's quite a stroke of marketing genius and gram scam. Me, I'll just buy a big bar and repackage it myself and save me calories and money. Besides, dark chocolate has less sugar and fat and milk in it, which makes it lower on the calories to begin with.