Letter to Northern Foods, owners of the Bowers brand (dated 28 May 2001):

Safeways are selling two packets of sausages on the same shelf, both containing 8 sausages and both costing £1.89. The Walls packet, however, contains the standard measure of 1 lb; your metric pack contains only 0.88 lb. In other words, you offer one sausage less at the same price!

I am writing to complain, and to urge you to supply only full measures, and to always use lb/oz on your packaging. To do otherwise will only further damage your reputation. Did you really believe no one would notice?

Dear Mr Poppitt,

I am in receipt of your comments regarding the weight of our Sausages, which you sent via the Northern Foods website.

We have, for a number of years now been declaring weight in grams, in line with the Food Labelling Guidelines, which state that the declaration shall be in metric, but may in addition include supplementary indication in imperial units. For certain products of ours, the weight declaration has not been 454g (the equivalent to 1lb), which has in no way been undertaken to confuse the consumer, but used as a means to hit competitive price points.

As I am sure you will understand, being competitively priced is a fundamental part of the marketing mix. We use only the finest quality ingredients, and as such, some of our recipes are expensive to produce. Rather than ask consumers to pay above the market price, we have reduced the weight of each sausage, rather than the number of sausages in the pack.

I hope that the above information explains our position on weight labelling, but should you have any future queries, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely
Andrea Tomlin
Product Manager

That's a funny reply. You know what they failed to believe we'd realize is that no matter how many sausage you have, be it 8 or 24, a pound is still a pound. You're still paying more for less, no matter if there are still 8 in the pack. Nice try though.

Bill Roland
"One more for the good guys."

That is a very respectable reply coming from someone who would like to have said something more apropos.