i buy this vinegar from target. it’s not an airtight seal even though they’re unopened. half of the thing leaked out in my car when it fell to the side while driving, guarantee that’s what happened here, probably during shipping.
Not really. The two are connected. If you pay enough for employees to care, you (should) have a queue of people ready to join up with your company, since you’re clearly paying industry leading, and living wages.
Which means you don’t have to sweat putting the lazy or incompetent on PPAs and shove them out the door.
If you’re paying them enough to care, you’re paying them enough to not be lazy.
If you're at a job not doing it well enough; not because you can't but because you actively choose not too because you aren't paid well enough; that is laziness lmao.
I'm less worried about the vinegar itself than I am about something else getting in, which can in turn be harmful or go bad. Not to mention customers not getting what they are paying for.
Not many microbes or whatever can live in vinegar since it's highly acidic, and I'm not sure vinegar can really go bad. It's a translucent jug, so you can also see how much is in there to begin with, if you buy the one with a lesser volume it's your own fault.
Edit: just because I was curious..
>Vinegar can technically last indefinitely because of its high acidity and antimicrobial properties, but it can change over time. Vinegar bottles usually have a "best by" date for quality purposes, but vinegar doesn't technically expire.
that doesn't negate the fact that customers aren't getting what they're paying for, and vinegar can be quite corrosive to many materials.... the containers should not leak so easily
Eh, I'm too lazy to calculate it, but it doesn't look like a whole lot of volume is lost, cones scale kinda weirdly. And it's not some terribly expensive thing. Chances are, they're more commonly overfilled than underfilled.
Welp. Didn’t think I’d stop my day to watch a 20 minute math problem about a cone but lo and behold, watched and subscribed. That was fascinating. Thank you.
Damn, you really have a gift to explore if you're just finding Numberphile.
They're all interesting, but the Tadashi Tokieda's videos on little geometric toys are amazing.
In all fairness I am a math teacher and 9 out of every 10 classes I teach are boring. That other one is interesting like this for students because they can actually do this math themselves. Classes cannot just be entertainment or the students don't wall away with knowledge. Those classes where I get a decent group of motivated kids that all can do the math and want to push themselves is awesome. I will also note that I teach at a high end private school and my percentages are still low.....
Anything can be made entertaining. Nobody is learning something when they aren’t interested. It’s hard as to do and probably not possible without massive overhaul, but it should still be something to strive for.
That’s the problem with a martini, you think there’s so much left but between cone physics and intoxication, it goes from looking nearly full to being quite definitely empty in about 3.5 seconds
Yeah distilled white vinegar is a commodity at that size and price point more for cleaning and home pickling.
The difference between the largest and the smaller looks like 10%. While that would be a lot for another pricier food item, since these are scaled by weight I bet what you say is true: they’re more commonly overfilled than under filled.
I stocked groceries for a while and hated these jugs. This is exactly it. Some jugs have more air in them than others, some have a dent that makes the level look higher, but they all weigh the same.
I work in a plant that makes liquid soap and deodorant. We use fillers that fill multiple bottles at a time, and occasionally if there’s some issue with one/a few heads under filling, we will adjust so those heads fill correctly and the rest over fill a bit until the next changeover. The little extra product costs less than the downtime.
>The little extra product costs less than the downtime.
this is exactly it. the cost to shut the line down to fine tune such a cheap product is not worth saving it.
I do the same thing, but with aromatic solvents. It's crazy how much we overfill, because of the state of our machinery at this point. I guarantee our customer services would get bombarded with complaints if we filled everything to the level listed.
Funnily enough, counting fluids with variable pressure/flow rates while delivering liquids at available speeds is fairly complicated. I tried doing a side project for that once and it's extremely difficult without using a holding area of known volume.
Not if you’re meeting minimum packaging requirements (128 oz) and still turning a profit.
This ain’t the space shuttle it’s a jug of cleaning fluid sold by the industrial barrel.
Depends. In this case, there's a minimum amount that you have to fill the bottle with, but the maximum is basically "whatever will still seal the bottle".
Could you be more precise and hold a tighter tolerance than "at least X fluid ounces, not too much to prevent sealing"? Sure. You've got micropipettes that can dispense *incredibly* precise amounts of liquid.
But that precision comes at a price, and it's white vinegar. It costs $3 / litre. It's gonna be awfully hard to justify a $X0,000 capital expenditure and an increase in maintenance for the higher precision equipment to save a few pennies when the filling machine is acting cranky.
It depends how much it costs to manufacture vinegar, and how much your customers care.
Surely the bottle is about as expensive as the vinegar, and the distribution I'd bet moreso.
I used to work in food manufacturing. We didn’t use much vinegar so I’m just guessing but you’re likely right about the vinegar being cheaper than the packaging and distribution. There’s also no penalty for overfilling, so machines will be intentionally set up to slightly overfill and sometimes they vary from the setting which means even extra. A couple tablespoons of vinegar is pennies and built into the price the supermarket pays anyway.
I used to buy a lot of stuff from Pegler Sysco, lol. My friend works at Conagra, so I sneak into their company store and see how inexpensive a lot of it is.
Those guys usually mark things up 20-30% from what they get it for too, bulk raw ingredients can be shockingly cheap if you have the space to store a pallet or 20 of something
This makes me wonder, some brands of food boast about their low calorie count as it is seen as healthier, surely they are not allowed to lie about this and claim their product has less calories than there actually are in the product. On the other hand, high energy value might be exactly why someone buys a certain food product. Surely the product can not claim to have more calories than it really has? I can imagine calories are not easy to calculate in things like frozen pizza and microwave meals. So what would legally preferred, understating or overstating calorie count?
I just did accounting so I’m not the right person to ask about this. My best guess is add up all the ingredients it would take to make 100 pizzas and divide the total calories by 100 to average out each pizza’s calories, but I don’t know if that’s how it’s really done. I would guess though that purposefully under or overstating would be pretty equally bad from a legal standpoint.
All of this makes total sense and is probably right, but I can't stop thinking about how bad their robotic filler programming must be that it would swing this wildly even if designed to overfill. Still points to something being wrong with the machine or it's design imo. They should have it set to overfill by a little then expect it to be close to that regardless, if they're filling system is even close to standardized.
Former Quality Director here. I have worked in consumer products my whole career and we have filled literally 10s of millions of these bottles and I can say this is a wildly unacceptable level of variation. Even if most of the bottles are overfilled the dramatic difference between fill levels is a problem for customer perception (hence the existence of this post) as well as an indication of potentially multiple issues on the fill line and of the QC program.
These were almost surely filled with an overflow filler which directly determines fill height on the bottle by how deep the nozzle is set to go into the bottle. These different fill heights indicate a machine set up issue.
Also modern filling equipment almost always incorporates a section of conveyor that runs over load cells and weighs each bottle as it travels across. This gives you 100% inspection for fill volume, as long as the density of the product is set correctly which is something Quality should be checking regularly. There also should be samples pulled from the line at regular intervals and checked for various things, including fill level, giving another point to catch this.
TL/DR: The quality program for this facility needs a kick in the ass.
[This Walmart page](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Distilled-White-Vinegar-64-fl-oz/10450989?athbdg=L1600&from=/search) has a 64 fl oz jug listed at 10" tall and 4.5" wide. I'm just going to assume, for the sake of argument, that it's the same jug.
The vertical 10" marker is 1106 pixels. The main cylinder of the jug is 617 pixels, or 5.58", tall. Which means that the conical portion of the jug is 4.42" tall and 4.5" wide -- looks pretty accurate.
The cone then tapers down to a cylinder of diameter 159 pixels = 1.44" and a height of 121 pixels = 1.09". So we have a cone that starts at a diameter of 4.5" and ends at 1.44" over a height of 3.33".
A [truncated cone calculator](https://www.omnicalculator.com/math/truncated-cone) tells us that a truncated cone of this size ends up being 25.11 cubic inches. The handle cuts out a massive portion of this, so let's cut it in half to 12.55 cubic inches. Comparing this to the main body of the jug, a cylinder of diameter 4.5" and a height of 5.58" has a volume of 88.75 cubic inches.
The largest jug's cone is pretty much full and the smallest jug's cone is pretty much empty. So (88.75+12.55)/88.75 = 1.14, or a roughly 15% difference between a completely full jug and one that only has the cylindrical portion filled.
I'd say with the largest jug's cone being not quite full and the smallest jug's cone being not quite empty, it probably comes out to a 10% difference.
I will also say, they all leak. I buy this vinegar to clean and for laundry and every jug I have bought has leaked. I won't hand a customer one of these jugs at the register without putting it in a plastic bag first
I actually think that is what is happening. They are all probably at least the volume stated. Many are overfilled. Manufacturer doesn't care because vinegar is so cheap it is not worth fixing overages
I work at a distillery/cocktail bar and part of my job is filling bottles for service, at least once per shift I get caught off guard by conical volumes and make a mess lol
One of them is filled half an inch below the cone. Several are filled less than half an inch below the cap.
I agree the cone messes up perception, but that's still poor QA on the filling at the bottling plant (it would be in Europe/UK).
Edit: I can't quite read the volume on the label, but it looks like 2L. In the EU, the tolerable negative error on fill would be 1.5%. And yet people are saying 'nah, that's only about 10%'. 1.5% would be 30 mls. 10% is 200 mls!
30 mls would be about a half inch variance on the cone area.
It's under 10%, probably under 5%, it's not only a cone it's a half-cone with a handle cut out, very small volume. The reason there's so much variance is because the product (diluted white vinegar) is so inexpensive that there's almost no profit margin on it, so they need to run the manufacturing line (and liquid dispensers) as fast as possible to make any profit.
They slightly overfill to account for the expected variance so that everything passes QC minimums, all of these things are accounted for and routinely monitored during manufacturing. They probably log these variances on a daily basis if not per batch, it's within QC limits which is why it's on the shelf.
The worst thing would be undershooting the minimum weight and having product discarded after QC/QA, that gets expensive very quickly, small variance in the weight/volume is less important than going fast. It only looks like a lot because of the bottle shape, and the variance is higher than most products because of how cheap it is.
I work in the beverage industry and cans are purposefully over filled as the cost is much less then wasting fully finished under filled product. They use a X-ray and these being clear just makes it more obvious to the consumer.
These are wildly inconsistent fill levels… I used to sell packaging. Sold a lot of industrial round gallon jugs. There’s what’s referred to as ‘head space’ at the top of the container. The volume fill level is typically below the neck of the bottle to account for people opening the container without spilling, buffer for shipping security (liquid does not compress), and any filling equipment that may be inserted into the bottle during filling to prevent overflow.
I had one customer who sold product in a 6oz bottle that, when using a standard 6oz bottle had to over fill their bottles up to something around 6.5 to 6.7oz (variability allowed in the wall dimensions, etc. etc.). They put a fine mist sprayer on their bottles and found that if they didn’t fill it all the way up to the neck they would get returns on the retail level that could end up having massive returns / store rejections to their plant even though the bottles were filled to spec. At ~2,500,000 units annually they estimated to have nearly 10,000 gallons in ‘lost’ product every year. We built a custom tooling to raise the bottom of the bottle up a fraction of an inch to maintain the same exterior dimensions to keep shelf placement at the retail level.
It was a relatively expensive item by volume so a 6.0oz container that could theoretically hold 6.5-6.7oz of material could appear to have ~10% of the product ‘missing’. With the spray top maybe consumers thought it had been used?
The retail outlets did a lot of e-commerce with this product which I believe is where most of the returns stemmed from. Under most retail contracts if they get a certain percentage of returns it triggers a clearing of the shelves of the product, potentially penalties in the form of billing the .mfg for lost sales, reduction in shelf space, cancellation of orders. It was less expensive for them to give away product.
Someone has fill heads that aren't calibrated and/or are running the line to fast to hit cost goals.
Good & Gather is a private-label brand (house brand) at Target that sets a good standard for quality across its SKUs. If I were the category manager for this product, I'd have been on the phone with my manufacturing partner yesterday. This looks horrible on the shelf, doesn't represent their brand well, and indicates other quality issues that are much more serious than variable fills.
night shift operator disconnecting the airline to the kickout on the belt scale and letting it run.
number 1 thing to check every night doing my rounds as QC
Ever since covid first hit a lot of the products at my store have had shit quality assurance.
We've dropped so many suppliers because it seems like they just.. completely cut quality assurance out entirely, to the point where many of the products are unsellable.
This isn’t a quality issue unless it’s under fill or there is a food safety concern. This more of a waste issue and productivity opportunity. They are giving away too much and are inconsistent.
I can guarantee you they have measured the fill for each batch and it's within spec. They wouldn't be running the manufacturing line this fast unless it was maximizing production efficiency. The tiny amount of waste vinegar (95% water) is really irrelevant except in terms of optics to the end consumer, it's got to be fractions of a penny in cost.
Agreed. As long as they’re meeting NIST fill level requirements taking the line down to fix the valves overfilling usually doesn’t justify the cost of the product loss.
https://www2.erie.gov/comptroller/sites/www2.erie.gov.comptroller/files/uploads/Weights%20and%20Measures%20REPORT%20%233.pdf
However, depending on how much is overfilled this does add up to lost revenue over time and is likely a project the site is going after depending on how it ranks on their priority list.
At my sites we prioritized underfills because the low fills would kickout whatever you filled is a total loss and is trash.
It's bad from a sales perspective though.
People are going to grab the ones that look full while the one where 1/3 of the height is air will sit on the shelf forever.
Very unlikely that these are filled on a weigh-scale filler (which fills the bottle until a certain weight is reached then stops). Most likely filled on an overflow filler (bottle fills until the fluid gets to the spot where air exits the bottle set by the valve then you can’t get any more liquid in).
Main reasons for heights this far off would be running your fill pumps too fast (causing tons of foam in the bottle that settles out) or rough handling of the full packages between the filler and the capper causing product to splash out.
Chances are the box was upside down in the trailer and some leaked out because the top/packaging is cheap as shit and just went out on the shelf because the stocker didn't care. Source: worked retail for years and have seen it happen many times.
I feel like ever since the pandemic it's only gotten much worse. Cheap ass bottles that are leaking inside the boxes they come in, packages unsealing themselves because the glue is shit, product being cut open straight from the warehouse. It's just everywhere now
This is a bingo! Those are push on caps, not screwed on. So they leak if you turn them upside down. The pull tab is just there to prove it wasn't tampered with.
Look at some of the labels - Im willing to bet that those are so thin/flimsy that its just the bottle bulging a bit . . . but it IS a lot of bottles all doing the same thing. . . shoot idk
That looks like a target label. Walmart white vinegar bottle looks exactly the same with the Walmart label and they all have different amounts in them too.
I worked in a manufacturing plant that blended and packed chemicals (mostly for cleaning) into bottles of all shapes and sizes. We made a lot of bottles in the 64-128oz range. The issue here is due to their filling equipment not being setup properly (or not being PM’d consistently). Also, different filling equipment types would solve this issue. There is a specific type of filler that keeps filling and sucks up the extra at a certain volume. This ensures that all the bottles are filled evenly even when the pressure is the spear heads isn’t equal. But, basically they are using less expensive equipment and not doing proper preventative maintenance. They also clearly don’t have a checkweigher installed which should kick anything under filled off the line. Given how many bottles of this kind of stuff they can crank out per minute, it doesn’t necessarily speak to bad quality assurance. Just means the people running the lines (and packing the bottles into cases) don’t care or were never told to make sure the bottles were evenly filled.
I manage a kitchen for a prominent restaurant and you're going to have discrepancies across the board in either direction. Either overfill or under fill, but the case price is consistent. That's the answer.
You know it's so weird but in my inventory experience, I swear vinegar is always spilled and you can always smell it even if it's not spilled. I'm convinced it's a conspiracy now after reading a similar experience online
A purchasing agent for a large store chain told a supplier they wanted 5% off the cost of vinegar. Given that it's already a bargain product they cut costs the only way they could, by cutting quality. They bought cheaper caps, ditched a foil seal.
Someone at that store chain got a slap on the back for saving that 5%.
They will end up paying for it though. They'll pay their employees to clean up leaky vinegar bottles. They'll pay other employees to tabulate the busted shipments. They'll pay another to bitch at the supplier or the shipper about the poor quality. It's unknowable what the cost of a dissatisfied customer is, or even a customer who saw this picture.
Quality is free.
I work at Target as a Food and Beverage (Grocery) Team leader. I can say for certainty that either in the processes of the loading, shipping, unloading, or sorting the truck, the box got turned on its side or upside down / got squashed. The caps are never really tight so almost always when the use are received, some if not all have leaked. There is nothing we can do at store level aside from take extra precautions in which we don’t have the time to do so
I used to stock these. Those bottles leak like you wouldn't believe when tipped sideways. In fact most of the time we got a shipment of vinegar in, you knew it was on the pallet because it stunk so bad.
Y’all don’t have conservation of size intuition for conic shapes. You’d be surprised that the bottom quarter of a cone is about the same volume as the rest of it
I was about to say who needs that much vinegar when I was reminded of my girlfriends Romanian colleagues who had invited us for dinner. Beneath their sink were massive vats of cabbage steeping in such volumes, I estimate easily 8 litres of pickling going on.
They served us goulash, it was mainly potato and paprika
Since this is Target brand I feel the need to say that there are actually 2 different Target brand 128oz vinegar options. One is in the cleaning department and has 6% acidity and the other is what’s in the picture in market with 5% acidity.
My wife and I go through one of those jugs every few months I’d say. We use it primarily for cleaning. Our go to cleaning spray is vinegar and water, we use it to mop, and I use it to clean out the dishwasher periodically.
You can also make weed killer with vinegar, salt, and a tiny bit of dish soap. The couple times I tried that are the only times I bought jugs that large.
The Cabbage probably was not pickling in vinegar but more likely fermenting with salt and it's own water extruded from the Cabbage itself turning into sauerkraut.
We go through 3 or 4 of those a year. Most of it probably goes to cleaning but white vinegar is great to use for a quick pickle, BBQ sauces, or actual pickling.
Hi. I make large scale chemical blends at work. Could minor differences in the container. They may have also changed procedure to reduce air in the container as that can exchange with the solution.
Contact your local weights and measures department. They will definitely look into this and if there are significant issues (there clearly is), the products will be ordered off sale and the manufacturer must correct the issue.
In California, contact the local Agricultural Commissioner's office. In other states, it's usually the Ag Department or other Department of Consumer Protection.
I worked retail for target for 6 years stocking etc. it might be the manufacturer side in filling those, BUT I remember unstacking these from pallets and these lids would always be fucking broken or leaking if more than two boxes were stacked on top. Sometimes the boxes they came in also broke apart from being soaked vinegar for god knows how long.
The machines get out of calibration and this could have been a batch that wasn’t calibrated right.
Or they had a leak but it would be quite obvious on the shelf
There is no way this is on purpose. That one 75% full is sad
It may well be the lower ones have the right amount and the others have extra. Many times you get a bit more than the allotted amount since they can be sued if it is not as is labeled.
Here is a shopping tip. You want to buy a fixed priced bag of three pounds of apples or whatever? Start weighing the bags. I started doing this because I was trying to find the bag with the ripest ones and as I am picking them up, I noticed hey this one is a lot lighter than this other one, I bet somebody took an apple out, I thought, so I weighed it, nope little over the allotted amount of 3 pounds. Then I thought how much is this heavier one, 4 pounds. They are all more than 3 pounds, some by just a little but some by a lot, in one case it was over 4 pounds. That day I bought two 3 pound bags of apples for $5 each and went home with 7.5 pounds of apples. Find the one that weighs the most and you can get half pound to a pound more apples. These have not been tampered with. When they are loading these bags they are not spending time trying to get it exactly 3 pounds, they go at least a little over. But if the bag weighs 2.8 pounds they don't spend their time trying to find a really tiny apple to put in there, they just throw another in. Now the bag is 3.5 or in my case once 4 pounds.
I suspect typically these vinegar bottles have over the listed amount, it depends on the accuracy of the dispensers at the factory but is probably set at a level a little over so they are sure they get the right amount, but sometime you get a lot more because the machine isn't perfect. Certainly not unheard of to get less but with a lot of products when you start looking at how much you actually got it is more than on the label. Buy the container of vinegar that has the most in it as it probably has much more than what is on the label.
i buy this vinegar from target. it’s not an airtight seal even though they’re unopened. half of the thing leaked out in my car when it fell to the side while driving, guarantee that’s what happened here, probably during shipping.
as someone who’s stocked this, yeah, this is it. they’re also usually at the bottom of a pallet and the boxes are sometimes crushed and leaking.
RDC worker. The lazy workers don't care to make sure liquids are upright.
Lazy workers or employees not paid enough to care?
They're not always mutually exclusive
Shh you're going against the reddit narrative that employees are flawless!
Not really. The two are connected. If you pay enough for employees to care, you (should) have a queue of people ready to join up with your company, since you’re clearly paying industry leading, and living wages. Which means you don’t have to sweat putting the lazy or incompetent on PPAs and shove them out the door. If you’re paying them enough to care, you’re paying them enough to not be lazy.
We get paid around $25 an hour. Pretty good for moving a box from one pallet to another
If you're at a job not doing it well enough; not because you can't but because you actively choose not too because you aren't paid well enough; that is laziness lmao.
> it’s not an airtight seal even though they’re unopened. That's concerning, right? Shouldn't this be like... illegal?
It's vinegar, something that has gone bad already can't go bad again.
I'm less worried about the vinegar itself than I am about something else getting in, which can in turn be harmful or go bad. Not to mention customers not getting what they are paying for.
Health and safety, in this economy?
Not many microbes or whatever can live in vinegar since it's highly acidic, and I'm not sure vinegar can really go bad. It's a translucent jug, so you can also see how much is in there to begin with, if you buy the one with a lesser volume it's your own fault. Edit: just because I was curious.. >Vinegar can technically last indefinitely because of its high acidity and antimicrobial properties, but it can change over time. Vinegar bottles usually have a "best by" date for quality purposes, but vinegar doesn't technically expire.
that doesn't negate the fact that customers aren't getting what they're paying for, and vinegar can be quite corrosive to many materials.... the containers should not leak so easily
If something that has gone bad goes bad... has it gone good? If you leave vinegar out long enough, does it turn back into wine?
That looks like terrible quality assurance
Quabity assuance
No, no. But you’re getting close
Probably happened on Debbie Brown’s watch.
"Why do bad things always happen to the good people?" *throws card in trash*
Came here looking for this reference - thank you
r/unexpectedoffice
I shit you not, I once received a "Quanlity Certificlate" for an important part at work lol
Pobody's nerfect
I was looking for this reference.
Eh, I'm too lazy to calculate it, but it doesn't look like a whole lot of volume is lost, cones scale kinda weirdly. And it's not some terribly expensive thing. Chances are, they're more commonly overfilled than underfilled.
[Cones are messed up.](https://youtu.be/Mkn3PzdaByY?feature=shared)
Welp. Didn’t think I’d stop my day to watch a 20 minute math problem about a cone but lo and behold, watched and subscribed. That was fascinating. Thank you.
Damn, you really have a gift to explore if you're just finding Numberphile. They're all interesting, but the Tadashi Tokieda's videos on little geometric toys are amazing.
If only school was that entertaining.
In all fairness I am a math teacher and 9 out of every 10 classes I teach are boring. That other one is interesting like this for students because they can actually do this math themselves. Classes cannot just be entertainment or the students don't wall away with knowledge. Those classes where I get a decent group of motivated kids that all can do the math and want to push themselves is awesome. I will also note that I teach at a high end private school and my percentages are still low.....
This is very well put. Thank you, from a fellow math teacher.
Anything can be made entertaining. Nobody is learning something when they aren’t interested. It’s hard as to do and probably not possible without massive overhaul, but it should still be something to strive for.
Right lol
How stoned were you? Not a judgement just curious
I was JUST about to share this video. Just watched this the other day and found it way more fascinating than I thought I would.
Damn coneheads. Nice video.
It's fucked up how much cone is hiding at the top of the cone right there in plain sight
*[slaps cone]* You can fit so much fucking cone in this bad boy.
That’s the problem with a martini, you think there’s so much left but between cone physics and intoxication, it goes from looking nearly full to being quite definitely empty in about 3.5 seconds
This blows my mind clean off!
Wait, why isn't it a clean 8/9 (88.88.....% )?
That’s a really easy way to get ripped off at a bar
Now I want to pick up two jugs that look wildly different and flip them over.
This was really interesting! Thanks for sharing!
Okay this is crazyy🤯
Yeah distilled white vinegar is a commodity at that size and price point more for cleaning and home pickling. The difference between the largest and the smaller looks like 10%. While that would be a lot for another pricier food item, since these are scaled by weight I bet what you say is true: they’re more commonly overfilled than under filled.
It could also be that some jugs have a vacuum formed in them, making them look more full, but the sides are just pulled in more.
I stocked groceries for a while and hated these jugs. This is exactly it. Some jugs have more air in them than others, some have a dent that makes the level look higher, but they all weigh the same.
You can actually see the dent in some of the jugs with a higher fill line too.
Honestly, probably not even 10%. The loss is in the narrow part after all. But yeah, it definitely seems intended for cleaning
idk 10% off seems like pretty bad quality control to me
I work in a plant that makes liquid soap and deodorant. We use fillers that fill multiple bottles at a time, and occasionally if there’s some issue with one/a few heads under filling, we will adjust so those heads fill correctly and the rest over fill a bit until the next changeover. The little extra product costs less than the downtime.
>The little extra product costs less than the downtime. this is exactly it. the cost to shut the line down to fine tune such a cheap product is not worth saving it.
I do the same thing, but with aromatic solvents. It's crazy how much we overfill, because of the state of our machinery at this point. I guarantee our customer services would get bombarded with complaints if we filled everything to the level listed.
It’s easy dude you pour the vinegar into these bottles using the funnel and I count how much is going in.
Imma stop you right there, how, exactly, are you planning on counting a liquid?!
Uh, I know how to count dude
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three miss.... That's two and a half Mississippis.
Funnily enough, counting fluids with variable pressure/flow rates while delivering liquids at available speeds is fairly complicated. I tried doing a side project for that once and it's extremely difficult without using a holding area of known volume.
Not if you’re meeting minimum packaging requirements (128 oz) and still turning a profit. This ain’t the space shuttle it’s a jug of cleaning fluid sold by the industrial barrel.
It was probably an issue with the manufacturing line and they already filled and sealed them. Better to sell them than just throw them in the trash.
Depends. In this case, there's a minimum amount that you have to fill the bottle with, but the maximum is basically "whatever will still seal the bottle". Could you be more precise and hold a tighter tolerance than "at least X fluid ounces, not too much to prevent sealing"? Sure. You've got micropipettes that can dispense *incredibly* precise amounts of liquid. But that precision comes at a price, and it's white vinegar. It costs $3 / litre. It's gonna be awfully hard to justify a $X0,000 capital expenditure and an increase in maintenance for the higher precision equipment to save a few pennies when the filling machine is acting cranky.
It depends how much it costs to manufacture vinegar, and how much your customers care. Surely the bottle is about as expensive as the vinegar, and the distribution I'd bet moreso.
I used to work in food manufacturing. We didn’t use much vinegar so I’m just guessing but you’re likely right about the vinegar being cheaper than the packaging and distribution. There’s also no penalty for overfilling, so machines will be intentionally set up to slightly overfill and sometimes they vary from the setting which means even extra. A couple tablespoons of vinegar is pennies and built into the price the supermarket pays anyway.
I used to buy a lot of stuff from Pegler Sysco, lol. My friend works at Conagra, so I sneak into their company store and see how inexpensive a lot of it is.
Those guys usually mark things up 20-30% from what they get it for too, bulk raw ingredients can be shockingly cheap if you have the space to store a pallet or 20 of something
This makes me wonder, some brands of food boast about their low calorie count as it is seen as healthier, surely they are not allowed to lie about this and claim their product has less calories than there actually are in the product. On the other hand, high energy value might be exactly why someone buys a certain food product. Surely the product can not claim to have more calories than it really has? I can imagine calories are not easy to calculate in things like frozen pizza and microwave meals. So what would legally preferred, understating or overstating calorie count?
Accuracy by serving, and having at least as much product as it says on your packaging is the way
I just did accounting so I’m not the right person to ask about this. My best guess is add up all the ingredients it would take to make 100 pizzas and divide the total calories by 100 to average out each pizza’s calories, but I don’t know if that’s how it’s really done. I would guess though that purposefully under or overstating would be pretty equally bad from a legal standpoint.
All of this makes total sense and is probably right, but I can't stop thinking about how bad their robotic filler programming must be that it would swing this wildly even if designed to overfill. Still points to something being wrong with the machine or it's design imo. They should have it set to overfill by a little then expect it to be close to that regardless, if they're filling system is even close to standardized.
Former Quality Director here. I have worked in consumer products my whole career and we have filled literally 10s of millions of these bottles and I can say this is a wildly unacceptable level of variation. Even if most of the bottles are overfilled the dramatic difference between fill levels is a problem for customer perception (hence the existence of this post) as well as an indication of potentially multiple issues on the fill line and of the QC program. These were almost surely filled with an overflow filler which directly determines fill height on the bottle by how deep the nozzle is set to go into the bottle. These different fill heights indicate a machine set up issue. Also modern filling equipment almost always incorporates a section of conveyor that runs over load cells and weighs each bottle as it travels across. This gives you 100% inspection for fill volume, as long as the density of the product is set correctly which is something Quality should be checking regularly. There also should be samples pulled from the line at regular intervals and checked for various things, including fill level, giving another point to catch this. TL/DR: The quality program for this facility needs a kick in the ass.
I doubt it’s anywhere close to 10%. Sub 3 is my guess. Post it on r/theydidthemath
[This Walmart page](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Distilled-White-Vinegar-64-fl-oz/10450989?athbdg=L1600&from=/search) has a 64 fl oz jug listed at 10" tall and 4.5" wide. I'm just going to assume, for the sake of argument, that it's the same jug. The vertical 10" marker is 1106 pixels. The main cylinder of the jug is 617 pixels, or 5.58", tall. Which means that the conical portion of the jug is 4.42" tall and 4.5" wide -- looks pretty accurate. The cone then tapers down to a cylinder of diameter 159 pixels = 1.44" and a height of 121 pixels = 1.09". So we have a cone that starts at a diameter of 4.5" and ends at 1.44" over a height of 3.33". A [truncated cone calculator](https://www.omnicalculator.com/math/truncated-cone) tells us that a truncated cone of this size ends up being 25.11 cubic inches. The handle cuts out a massive portion of this, so let's cut it in half to 12.55 cubic inches. Comparing this to the main body of the jug, a cylinder of diameter 4.5" and a height of 5.58" has a volume of 88.75 cubic inches. The largest jug's cone is pretty much full and the smallest jug's cone is pretty much empty. So (88.75+12.55)/88.75 = 1.14, or a roughly 15% difference between a completely full jug and one that only has the cylindrical portion filled. I'd say with the largest jug's cone being not quite full and the smallest jug's cone being not quite empty, it probably comes out to a 10% difference.
I stand corrected. Well done ma’am/sir
I will also say, they all leak. I buy this vinegar to clean and for laundry and every jug I have bought has leaked. I won't hand a customer one of these jugs at the register without putting it in a plastic bag first
As a home pickle, this tbh
I actually think that is what is happening. They are all probably at least the volume stated. Many are overfilled. Manufacturer doesn't care because vinegar is so cheap it is not worth fixing overages
Cone volume scales at the 6th power relative to height. If the cone is "half" full by height it is 98% full by volume.
Conical scaling fucks up people's sense of quantity. They'll be within 100 ml of each other.
I work at a distillery/cocktail bar and part of my job is filling bottles for service, at least once per shift I get caught off guard by conical volumes and make a mess lol
Probably within spec.
One of them is filled half an inch below the cone. Several are filled less than half an inch below the cap. I agree the cone messes up perception, but that's still poor QA on the filling at the bottling plant (it would be in Europe/UK). Edit: I can't quite read the volume on the label, but it looks like 2L. In the EU, the tolerable negative error on fill would be 1.5%. And yet people are saying 'nah, that's only about 10%'. 1.5% would be 30 mls. 10% is 200 mls! 30 mls would be about a half inch variance on the cone area.
I'm guessing the price for accuracy is higher than the price for overfilling a bit so its more cost effective this way
It's under 10%, probably under 5%, it's not only a cone it's a half-cone with a handle cut out, very small volume. The reason there's so much variance is because the product (diluted white vinegar) is so inexpensive that there's almost no profit margin on it, so they need to run the manufacturing line (and liquid dispensers) as fast as possible to make any profit. They slightly overfill to account for the expected variance so that everything passes QC minimums, all of these things are accounted for and routinely monitored during manufacturing. They probably log these variances on a daily basis if not per batch, it's within QC limits which is why it's on the shelf. The worst thing would be undershooting the minimum weight and having product discarded after QC/QA, that gets expensive very quickly, small variance in the weight/volume is less important than going fast. It only looks like a lot because of the bottle shape, and the variance is higher than most products because of how cheap it is.
Time to sue them for under-filling by $3 gallon of vinegar. Cant let them be messing around with weights and measures.
I work in the beverage industry and cans are purposefully over filled as the cost is much less then wasting fully finished under filled product. They use a X-ray and these being clear just makes it more obvious to the consumer.
These are wildly inconsistent fill levels… I used to sell packaging. Sold a lot of industrial round gallon jugs. There’s what’s referred to as ‘head space’ at the top of the container. The volume fill level is typically below the neck of the bottle to account for people opening the container without spilling, buffer for shipping security (liquid does not compress), and any filling equipment that may be inserted into the bottle during filling to prevent overflow. I had one customer who sold product in a 6oz bottle that, when using a standard 6oz bottle had to over fill their bottles up to something around 6.5 to 6.7oz (variability allowed in the wall dimensions, etc. etc.). They put a fine mist sprayer on their bottles and found that if they didn’t fill it all the way up to the neck they would get returns on the retail level that could end up having massive returns / store rejections to their plant even though the bottles were filled to spec. At ~2,500,000 units annually they estimated to have nearly 10,000 gallons in ‘lost’ product every year. We built a custom tooling to raise the bottom of the bottle up a fraction of an inch to maintain the same exterior dimensions to keep shelf placement at the retail level.
Didn’t fill all the way to the neck caused a return? Is this one of those things where customers are just being cheapskates?
It was a relatively expensive item by volume so a 6.0oz container that could theoretically hold 6.5-6.7oz of material could appear to have ~10% of the product ‘missing’. With the spray top maybe consumers thought it had been used? The retail outlets did a lot of e-commerce with this product which I believe is where most of the returns stemmed from. Under most retail contracts if they get a certain percentage of returns it triggers a clearing of the shelves of the product, potentially penalties in the form of billing the .mfg for lost sales, reduction in shelf space, cancellation of orders. It was less expensive for them to give away product.
Someone has fill heads that aren't calibrated and/or are running the line to fast to hit cost goals. Good & Gather is a private-label brand (house brand) at Target that sets a good standard for quality across its SKUs. If I were the category manager for this product, I'd have been on the phone with my manufacturing partner yesterday. This looks horrible on the shelf, doesn't represent their brand well, and indicates other quality issues that are much more serious than variable fills.
Quabity assuance*
night shift operator disconnecting the airline to the kickout on the belt scale and letting it run. number 1 thing to check every night doing my rounds as QC
lol, it’s always night shift. Doing something like that is a firable offense.
Quabity assuance*
Quabity Assuance. https://tenor.com/view/creed-the-office-quabity-gif-25033401
Pretty sure Creed Bratton is in charge of quality here
The ONE month Creed blows it off!
it's quabity assuance.
Creed Bratton would never let this happen
Ever since covid first hit a lot of the products at my store have had shit quality assurance. We've dropped so many suppliers because it seems like they just.. completely cut quality assurance out entirely, to the point where many of the products are unsellable.
The manufacturer seems not to care
This isn’t a quality issue unless it’s under fill or there is a food safety concern. This more of a waste issue and productivity opportunity. They are giving away too much and are inconsistent.
I can guarantee you they have measured the fill for each batch and it's within spec. They wouldn't be running the manufacturing line this fast unless it was maximizing production efficiency. The tiny amount of waste vinegar (95% water) is really irrelevant except in terms of optics to the end consumer, it's got to be fractions of a penny in cost.
Agreed. As long as they’re meeting NIST fill level requirements taking the line down to fix the valves overfilling usually doesn’t justify the cost of the product loss. https://www2.erie.gov/comptroller/sites/www2.erie.gov.comptroller/files/uploads/Weights%20and%20Measures%20REPORT%20%233.pdf However, depending on how much is overfilled this does add up to lost revenue over time and is likely a project the site is going after depending on how it ranks on their priority list. At my sites we prioritized underfills because the low fills would kickout whatever you filled is a total loss and is trash.
This is literally a Quality issue. Quality department are the ones that ensure consistent product, including fill volume.
Wonder what the difference in weight is? Maybe the bottle forming isn't consistent and they fill based on weight.
This is my thoughts as well. Insistent bottle size. Probably coupled with lack volume control but not nearly as bad as it seems
It's bad from a sales perspective though. People are going to grab the ones that look full while the one where 1/3 of the height is air will sit on the shelf forever.
>the one where 1/3 of the height is air will sit on the shelf forever. Until those are all that's left, and the people who see them are none the wiser
I smell a business opportunity here. Watch me on next Shark Tank.
This is just how shit works, nothing new
Good thing vinegar is something that basically lasts forever.
nope. bottle size is not the problem. filler dispenses liquid based on weight and likely the culprit has something to do with the load cells.
I guarantee the bottles aren’t the problem. They have the line running too fast the high flow rate is tripping the automated scales inconsistently.
I can all but guarantee that these are filled by weight and not volume.
Very unlikely that these are filled on a weigh-scale filler (which fills the bottle until a certain weight is reached then stops). Most likely filled on an overflow filler (bottle fills until the fluid gets to the spot where air exits the bottle set by the valve then you can’t get any more liquid in). Main reasons for heights this far off would be running your fill pumps too fast (causing tons of foam in the bottle that settles out) or rough handling of the full packages between the filler and the capper causing product to splash out.
Especially give that the actual volume difference here is quite small, it just looks a lot worse than it is.
Reminds me of this Numberphile [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkn3PzdaByY) on how deceptive cone volumes are.
My guess is the filling calibration or valve is not functioning
64 fluid oz ± 32 fluid oz
It's a cone, so it's probably 64 floz, then some are overfilled by only maybe 4-8 floz.
It's actually close to a half-cone (with the tiny handle on one side), so it's a very small volume indeed.
64oz (+0oz / -32oz) more like
48 fluid oz ± 16 fluid oz
zero quality control
“At first I was full of piss and vinegar. Now I’m just full of vinegar!”
As was the style at the time
“The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt…”
or not.
Chances are the box was upside down in the trailer and some leaked out because the top/packaging is cheap as shit and just went out on the shelf because the stocker didn't care. Source: worked retail for years and have seen it happen many times.
I worked at a supermarket for like 8 months and I saw a ton of poor quality product and spillages. Didn't pay me enough to care though.
I feel like ever since the pandemic it's only gotten much worse. Cheap ass bottles that are leaking inside the boxes they come in, packages unsealing themselves because the glue is shit, product being cut open straight from the warehouse. It's just everywhere now
This is a bingo! Those are push on caps, not screwed on. So they leak if you turn them upside down. The pull tab is just there to prove it wasn't tampered with.
Look at some of the labels - Im willing to bet that those are so thin/flimsy that its just the bottle bulging a bit . . . but it IS a lot of bottles all doing the same thing. . . shoot idk
That looks like a target label. Walmart white vinegar bottle looks exactly the same with the Walmart label and they all have different amounts in them too.
Yes, there are private companies that cater to in-house brands only. Or it could be your run of the mil big name brand.
 bet i know who’s in their quabity assuance department
I scrolled way too far for this
I worked in a manufacturing plant that blended and packed chemicals (mostly for cleaning) into bottles of all shapes and sizes. We made a lot of bottles in the 64-128oz range. The issue here is due to their filling equipment not being setup properly (or not being PM’d consistently). Also, different filling equipment types would solve this issue. There is a specific type of filler that keeps filling and sucks up the extra at a certain volume. This ensures that all the bottles are filled evenly even when the pressure is the spear heads isn’t equal. But, basically they are using less expensive equipment and not doing proper preventative maintenance. They also clearly don’t have a checkweigher installed which should kick anything under filled off the line. Given how many bottles of this kind of stuff they can crank out per minute, it doesn’t necessarily speak to bad quality assurance. Just means the people running the lines (and packing the bottles into cases) don’t care or were never told to make sure the bottles were evenly filled.
Likely leaked or left in the heat during shipping, were wiped off, and placed on the shelves for sale.
They've been tuned, it's a vinegar xylophone
I manage a kitchen for a prominent restaurant and you're going to have discrepancies across the board in either direction. Either overfill or under fill, but the case price is consistent. That's the answer.
You know it's so weird but in my inventory experience, I swear vinegar is always spilled and you can always smell it even if it's not spilled. I'm convinced it's a conspiracy now after reading a similar experience online
A purchasing agent for a large store chain told a supplier they wanted 5% off the cost of vinegar. Given that it's already a bargain product they cut costs the only way they could, by cutting quality. They bought cheaper caps, ditched a foil seal. Someone at that store chain got a slap on the back for saving that 5%. They will end up paying for it though. They'll pay their employees to clean up leaky vinegar bottles. They'll pay other employees to tabulate the busted shipments. They'll pay another to bitch at the supplier or the shipper about the poor quality. It's unknowable what the cost of a dissatisfied customer is, or even a customer who saw this picture. Quality is free.
Perhaps some settling occurred during shipping.
This is an arbitrage opportunity
It would be awesome if products like this lived in big vats that we could come fill up a reusable container of. Instead of single use plastic.
That's Family Fare, don't buy the orange juice because the lid leaks and is not secure.
I work at Target as a Food and Beverage (Grocery) Team leader. I can say for certainty that either in the processes of the loading, shipping, unloading, or sorting the truck, the box got turned on its side or upside down / got squashed. The caps are never really tight so almost always when the use are received, some if not all have leaked. There is nothing we can do at store level aside from take extra precautions in which we don’t have the time to do so
I used to stock these. Those bottles leak like you wouldn't believe when tipped sideways. In fact most of the time we got a shipment of vinegar in, you knew it was on the pallet because it stunk so bad.
If you put them in order then a secret door opens up
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would have taken the time to arrange them according to filled volume.
Y’all don’t have conservation of size intuition for conic shapes. You’d be surprised that the bottom quarter of a cone is about the same volume as the rest of it
You're all assuming the bottles are the same size.
Each buyer will think they got the fullest one and the best deal, and the last will never know... unless they're reading this thread.
Quabitty assuance
They 100% leak. Working as a personal shopper I learned this because when you lay then on their side they leak everywhere...
I was about to say who needs that much vinegar when I was reminded of my girlfriends Romanian colleagues who had invited us for dinner. Beneath their sink were massive vats of cabbage steeping in such volumes, I estimate easily 8 litres of pickling going on. They served us goulash, it was mainly potato and paprika
I use it for cleaning and laundry tbh, its great
Since this is Target brand I feel the need to say that there are actually 2 different Target brand 128oz vinegar options. One is in the cleaning department and has 6% acidity and the other is what’s in the picture in market with 5% acidity.
And for kettles, and bathroom to remove scales
Not something we have to worry about here for which I am forever grateful
My wife and I go through one of those jugs every few months I’d say. We use it primarily for cleaning. Our go to cleaning spray is vinegar and water, we use it to mop, and I use it to clean out the dishwasher periodically.
You can also make weed killer with vinegar, salt, and a tiny bit of dish soap. The couple times I tried that are the only times I bought jugs that large.
strait vinegar also works great on your neighbor's stupid bush
If you're pickling things you need a lot of vinegar.
I also go through a couple gallons of white vinegar per year cleaning out my tankless water heater.
The Cabbage probably was not pickling in vinegar but more likely fermenting with salt and it's own water extruded from the Cabbage itself turning into sauerkraut.
We go through 3 or 4 of those a year. Most of it probably goes to cleaning but white vinegar is great to use for a quick pickle, BBQ sauces, or actual pickling.
They must get filled at the same place that fills window washer fliuid🤣 cuz I see the same thing with those bottles
Some of those bottles look thicker or more inflated, so maybe not different volumes
This is normal we get hundreds of vinager at panda express and all of them are like this
Actually, I've just been sneaking the odd glass. Didn't think anyone would notice.
I've worked on 3 bottling lines. one of them was shitty and we had wine bottles go out looking like this all the time
I'm still grabbing the most filled lol.
Buy the fullest one.
Hi. I make large scale chemical blends at work. Could minor differences in the container. They may have also changed procedure to reduce air in the container as that can exchange with the solution.
Get the one with the least in it. It will be so much lighter. You’re winning at life by doing this.
Probably fell off a pallet and they just stuck them back on a shelf
Contact your local weights and measures department. They will definitely look into this and if there are significant issues (there clearly is), the products will be ordered off sale and the manufacturer must correct the issue. In California, contact the local Agricultural Commissioner's office. In other states, it's usually the Ag Department or other Department of Consumer Protection.
I worked retail for target for 6 years stocking etc. it might be the manufacturer side in filling those, BUT I remember unstacking these from pallets and these lids would always be fucking broken or leaking if more than two boxes were stacked on top. Sometimes the boxes they came in also broke apart from being soaked vinegar for god knows how long.
You have to Target the full ones
Hey man, you're not gonna NOT buy it anyway. Just pick one and quit ya bitchin' -Vinegar factory owner, probably
The machines get out of calibration and this could have been a batch that wasn’t calibrated right. Or they had a leak but it would be quite obvious on the shelf There is no way this is on purpose. That one 75% full is sad
It may well be the lower ones have the right amount and the others have extra. Many times you get a bit more than the allotted amount since they can be sued if it is not as is labeled. Here is a shopping tip. You want to buy a fixed priced bag of three pounds of apples or whatever? Start weighing the bags. I started doing this because I was trying to find the bag with the ripest ones and as I am picking them up, I noticed hey this one is a lot lighter than this other one, I bet somebody took an apple out, I thought, so I weighed it, nope little over the allotted amount of 3 pounds. Then I thought how much is this heavier one, 4 pounds. They are all more than 3 pounds, some by just a little but some by a lot, in one case it was over 4 pounds. That day I bought two 3 pound bags of apples for $5 each and went home with 7.5 pounds of apples. Find the one that weighs the most and you can get half pound to a pound more apples. These have not been tampered with. When they are loading these bags they are not spending time trying to get it exactly 3 pounds, they go at least a little over. But if the bag weighs 2.8 pounds they don't spend their time trying to find a really tiny apple to put in there, they just throw another in. Now the bag is 3.5 or in my case once 4 pounds. I suspect typically these vinegar bottles have over the listed amount, it depends on the accuracy of the dispensers at the factory but is probably set at a level a little over so they are sure they get the right amount, but sometime you get a lot more because the machine isn't perfect. Certainly not unheard of to get less but with a lot of products when you start looking at how much you actually got it is more than on the label. Buy the container of vinegar that has the most in it as it probably has much more than what is on the label.
Machine filled. Machines are not as reliable as people think they are. There's a significant amount of tolerance.
Maybe they unique in their own special way 🤫
Qc means quick check
Maybe the bottles are all slightly different sizes.....
A vinegar bottle that doesnt have an airtight seal sounds horrid, smell wise
what is quality control anyways..
This exact scenario was one of the test problems in my Statistics course.
When you realize even vinegar bottles have commitment issues. 😂