Retail

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Brush Your Teeth and Get Vitamins Too?

For years, product manufacturers have added vitamins to their products as a marketing tool to boost health conscious consumers’ interest in them. Now comes a new product called Vitaminpaste®. You guessed it — a toothpaste with vitamins (and curiously, no fluoride).

Vitaminpaste

Here’s how it is advertised:

vitaminpastead

The company claims that you “Get extra vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants every time you brush.” The ad also says the product is safe to swallow.

To us, what’s hard to understand is the claim that this product is going to boost your intake of vitamins. The ad doesn’t list all the vitamins in the paste, and neither it nor their website specifies the amounts of each in the product. So… we found a tube in the store and checked the back.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Vitaminpaste ingredients

An inch of toothpaste delivers just 7% of the daily requirement of eight vitamins and minerals. And maybe if you ate the stuff, you would get that small boost of vitamins. But most people spit out toothpaste. And even the back of the box recommends you spit it out and rinse the residue.

*MOUSE PRINT:

instructions

So the question becomes, can vitamins and minerals be absorbed by the body just by being in your mouth for a minute or less? The company’s answer is actually on the back of the box in small print.

*MOUSE PRINT:

absorb rate

According to them, you only get 10% of the listed daily requirement. That means you get 7/10ths of one percent of each vitamin per brushing.

For about $4.99 for a 4.1 ounce tube, this whole thing is hard to swallow.

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Did You Fall for the Whole Foods Price Cuts Hype?

It seems like virtually every newspaper and media outlet carried stories at the end of August breathlessly touting price cuts at Whole Foods now that Amazon has taken over the high-priced chain.

Whole Foods Headlines

One would think with such headlines that everything in the store was now at bargain basement prices. Nothing could be further from the truth. All these reporters were buying what Amazon was selling in their press release without checking the true extent of the price cuts and how that would affect the average shopper.

MrConsumer made a visit to the medium size Whole Foods in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood two days before the price drop and again twice last week afterwards. Rather than finding large signs all over the store proclaiming that thousands of items had been cut in price, it appeared that very little had changed.

*MOUSE PRINT:

365 Tomato sauce

On his third store visit, the day after the price drops, MrConsumer went up and down every aisle, electronic clicker in hand, trying to count every item bearing the Whole Foods + Amazon orange logo signaling a new lower price. The final count: only 49 items were cut in price. Put another way, Amazon did not reduce the price of 99.5% of the estimated 10,000 items carried by the average Whole Foods store. A Whole Foods spokesperson confirmed the number of items carried, but refused to discuss the list of affected products or even just the number of items reduced.

Some of these products were accounted for multiple times in the overall tally, like the seven flavors of one brand of tomato sauce, the four varieties of one brand of eggs, and the over half a dozen sizes of bottled water. Together, those three products alone accounted for nearly 40 percent of all the price reductions.

Now, were there legitimate and sizable price reductions? Absolutely. Atlantic salmon went from $12.99 a pound to $9.99, and fancy schmancy ground beef in a cryovac package dropped from $8.99 to $6.99 a pound. Are these now bargains? Not exactly. Are more price reductions coming? They say so.

Salmon before/after

Amazon and Whole Foods were masterful at getting the media to promote an almost nonexistent price drop, and in turn at helping them counteract the supermarket’s high-price image. The reality is that the average shopper will barely notice any savings in their weekly grocery bill at least in the short-run.

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Pret a Manger Accused of Deceptive Sandwich Packaging

MrConsumer had occasion to eat at what he considers an expensive regional European sandwich shop last March called Pret a Manger. He discovered something sneaky about how they packaged their sandwich wraps.

Pret Bang Bang Chicken

Upon opening the package, one gets an unexpected surprise.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Pret revealed

What looked like a long wrap sandwich, potentially worth the $7.49 price, turns out to be two small halves that come nowhere close to filling the package. The “Lovingly Made” cardboard surrounding the middle of the sandwich hides the dirty little secret of the empty space between the two halves. I thought to myself — great — I have a good Mouse Print* story.

As we have discussed in the past, deceptive packaging can be illegal, particularly when there is nonfunctional empty space in the package. That’s called slack fill, and it tends to give consumers a misimpression about the actual contents of the package. It makes the consumer think there is more product inside than there really is.

Fast forward to this summer when a New York consumer purchased a different wrap at Pret and got snookered too. He thought to himself — great — and he filed a class action lawsuit a few weeks ago against the company claiming millions of dollars of losses suffered by purchasers of these kinds of wraps. His lawsuit claims that depending on the sandwich there can be up to two-and-a-half inches of empty space between the two halves. (See story in Gothamist.)

So we asked Pret about their reaction to the lawsuit and why they package their wraps in this deceptive manner. They did not respond.