Sausages come in tens because the meat production line is built around a standard smoking-rack size, and buns come in eights because bakeries think in baking trays, not sausage pairs. There was never any real coordination between the two industries. It's just how it is. And once companies noticed the gap gets people back in the store sooner, plenty of them stopped fixing it on purpose.
In behavioral economics this is called packaging mismatch, and it's not a leftover glitch, it's a lever. Once the packs don't divide into each other with nothing left over, you get exactly two options: throw away the extra, or buy a whole new pack just to close a gap of two. Both options send you back to the register earlier than you planned, and that's exactly what sells, not because the product tastes better, but because the packaging math works against you.
I see the exact same mechanism at Claude, just flipped, and it's kind of nice to find it in my own lane for once. There are three subscription tiers: Pro at $20, Max 5x at around $100, Max 20x at around $200. The name promises five times or twenty times the usage, but the price only goes up five times and ten times respectively, not twenty, and yes, I checked that more than once because it sounded too strange to be true. Every upgrade gives you more usage per dollar, not less, which is the exact opposite of the sausages: there, the mismatch pushes you to buy more of the same value, here it rewards you for already buying a lot.
In practice, picking a tier is just arithmetic, not a leap of faith: take your monthly usage volume and check where it's actually worth crossing over (I moved to Max myself the moment I saw we were hitting the Pro ceiling every week, not because anyone talked me into it, someone just ran me the numbers). So next time you're left with two lonely buns in the fridge, know it's not a production mistake, it's consumer behavior designed for you, exactly like your subscription tier.
A prompt, on the house
Before you recommend a subscription tier to me:
1. Ask how many times this week I hit the usage ceiling (the "you've reached your limit" message).
2. If it happened less than once a week, tell me to stay on my current tier.
3. If it happened twice or more, calculate the cost of upgrading per extra hour of use, not just the total price.
4. If I'm already on the top tier, remind me to check whether I'm actually using what I'm paying for.
Don't recommend I upgrade just because a higher tier exists.Run this before your next renewal, and you'll probably find most people aren't on the right tier for their usage, in either direction.
