In yesterday's article Coming Back From Florida I lose Two Ounces, I pointed out to my readers the insidious method Hormel Foods, the manufacturer of Skippy® Brand Peanut Butter, uses to skimp 1.7 ounces of their product by using the exact same outer dimensions for the jar but carving out a deeper indentation on the bottom. Thus to the casual consumer, the jar appears the same as always.

Hormel Foods relies on the habitual behavior of most consumers to pick the product off the shelf and into the shopping basket without looking at the printed weight. Some of it is laziness, most of it is habit.

Habit is tough to break - a thing I learned in the vending machine business. Back in 1970 my brother and I started Intervend, a vending machine company with over 500 jukeboxes, pool tables, cigarette, candy, soda, coffee, sandwich, and ice cream machines. One thing you do not want to do with consumers is change the location of your vending machines. Let me give you an example:

At one end of my hometown, Bayonne, New Jersey, on Avenue C there was a Gulf Station that had a huge milk vending machine similar to the one pictured above. I approached the owner and offered to put an Ice Vending Machine (dispensing bags of ice cubes for 50 cents) on his property - below is an image of a machine similar to our bagged ice cube dispenser.

He liked the idea but instead of putting the machine about 50 feet away from the milk machine, he wanted me to put the ice machine in the exact same spot as the milk machine and move it 50 feet away from where it was currently. I told him that it was a bad idea, that his customers would get confused, but he insisted, remarking that the Ice machine had gigantic letters spelling out ICE.

Want to know what happened? In less than a week he asked me to switch the machines - to put the milk machine back where it originally was located. Here's why: every single person who came up to the machine would put money in the coin slot without looking at the rest of the machine; when a bag of ice-cubes plopped into the dispensing area instead of a container of milk, the customer would look baffled and bring the bag of ice to the gas station owner and ask for his money back along with the plea, "Why did you take out the milk machine?" The owner would dejectedly point to the milk machine 50 feet away.

This went on for days until he couldn't take it anymore. Habit. Tough thing to break.