Truth in Labeling, Part 2

This is a follow-up to my previous post regarding truth in labeling. I had picked Nabisco’s Wheat Thins simply because it was the only snack food I had on hand. Since it’s a minimum two-hour round trip to the nearest grocery, I wasn’t going to go out just to buy a bag of potato chips (the real villain in this category), nor was I going to wait until the next absolutely necessary town trip (like to get beer). And besides if I had waited I probably would have forgotten the whole idea. Slowly rotting mind, you know.

This Nabisco product comes out surprisingly well in my scientific analysis. I started with a new package and sorted the crackers into two piles: Whole and Broken. They’re packaged by weight, so I weighed the whole ones, then the broken ones. If a cracker had only a tiny corner missing, it went in the broken pile. Using those criteria, the whole-versus-broken ratio was 23:4. If I included the ones that were only nominally broken in the whole-cracker pile, which is only fair, the ratio increased to an astounding 19:1! For every nineteen crackers in the package, only one cracker’s-worth is broken to any significant extent.

Statistics like that are hard to beat. If Nabisco took the care necessary to pack and ship only unbroken crackers, the cost would surely be much higher. Besides, the buyer simply needs to do what we do in our house; we have the package opened, sorted, and re-packed by our man-servant. He gets to keep the broken ones.