You Have To Be Smarter Than The Advertisers

[Rita Hancock]

Long ago, before our beloved dog passed away, I bought a super-huge package of Pupperoni dog treats for him from Sam’s Club. When I opened the mega pack, much to my surprise, I found that the dog treats were gigantic. I had to break them in half in order for them to weigh the same as the regular Pupperoni treats from the grocery store.

Obviously, the goal of the deceptive packaging is to get you to feed your dog larger portions of the treats, overall, and run out earlier and have to buy more. The unscrupulous perpetrators of this deception figure you’re too oblivious to notice their scam. They figure you won’t notice when your 10x larger bag of treats lasts only 5x longer than the small bag from the regular grocery store because the serving sizes are bigger.

Unfortunately, in many cases, the packaging and marketing people are right. Consumers are oblivious to what a  reasonable serving size is. Most consumers figure “one unit” of the food is one serving size. But remember that marketers package food items deceptively. For example, one “big grab” bag of chips at the convenience store or one of those candy bar size packs of cookies at the convenience store each contain at least two servings. And one of those gigantic Otis Spunkmeyer muffins is actually two servings, as well.

That’s why I repackage treats that come in large packages. In the case of the dog treats, I break each in half and then divide the mega pack into three Ziplock freezer bags so they don’t get stale as I sparingly dole them out to my dog.

When it comes to people treats (like Oreos) I use the same strategy as with dog treats. I split the package into individual serving size snack bags, as well. I put two or three cookies into each little snack-size bag, and tell the kids they can have one baggie of cookies per day, at most.

You have to be as wise as a serpent and read labels to discern portion sizes. Things are not always as they appear, and that’s most definitely true in the world of deceptive marketing and packaging.