Unit pricing in the grocery stores helps consumers to choose value when comparing products on the shelf. This is particularly useful for comparing products on sale. Unfortunately unit pricing does not help when comparing batteries.
Unit pricing provides shoppers with a per battery price. There are two problems for me with this:
- When comparing rechargable batteries it does not tell me which battery has the higher capacity.
- When comparing alkaline or heavy-duty batteries I’ve got no idea at all because the capacity of the battery is not show on the pack or on the battery.
I would like to know how much the charge in the battery is going to cost me. For example I would like to know which battery is going to be cost less to run my digital camera for 5 hours.
I would like to see the following:
- All batteries be required to show clearly their capacity in mAh (milli-Amp hour) or Ah (Amp hour) for large batteries.
- Unit pricing for batteries to be show in $/mAh (cost per milli-Amp hour) or $/Ah (cost per Amp hour). The cost per consumable unit.
Consumers will then be able to make a direct comparison between the usefulness and cost of batteries.
Of course the cynic in me says that battery companies don’t wont consumers to be able to compare batteries in this way. Consumers might only buy high capacity batteries!