Dressing unbottled Over the years, Mr. Tidbit has ranted about pointless single-serve "convenience" packaging. His favorite recent one was little tubs of peanut butter. (Where would you be that you wouldn't want to keep a whole jar of peanut butter -- but that you would have bread and a knife?) Such products always cost more, too, of course.
Anyway, Mr. Tidbit must acknowledge that, rarely, a "convenience" package actually makes sense. If you're watching calories and dining out, you might well find that a restaurant doesn't offer reduced-fat salad dressings, but carting around a bottle of salad dressing is both inconvenient and potentially very messy. Kraft now offers several varieties of its light salad dressings in a little box of eight single-serve (1-ounce) packets, one or two of which would be easy to keep in pocket or purse.
Of course they cost way too much: At a store where 16-ounce bottles of Kraft dressings sell for $2.68 (16.8 cents an ounce) the eight-pack of dressing packets is $2.85 (35.6 cents an ounce).
Price up? By all beans! It occurred to Mr. Tidbit only recently that offering higher-price varieties is one way for a manufacturer to silently but effectively raise prices overall.
Take the new Grillin' Beans line from Bush's. (Mr. Tidbit has no idea what "Grillin' Beans" means that is different from baked beans, of which Bush's offers many, many varieties. It might well mean that they're not baked, as the word "baked" appears nowhere on the can.) At a store where the 28-ounce cans of Bush's baked beans are $1.52, the 22-ounce cans of Grillin' Beans are $1.79 (50 percent more per ounce). If just 10 percent (by weight) of the nation's Bush's-beans consumption switched from baked beans to Grillin' Beans (and if the Grillin' Beans cost no more to make, which Mr. Tidbit would happily suggest), that would amount to a 5 percent price increase for the combined products.
AL SICHERMAN
