Quandiment
I eat lunch at work each day, and sometimes that lunch includes french fries. I like to eat my french fries with ketchup. Normally, I get my ketchup from a pump dispenser. Sometimes, however, the pump dispenser is empty—or worse, the ketchup it dispenses is runny. (At first I thought they were watering the ketchup when they ran low, but then I found out the dispenser takes sealed bags of ketchup. Why is there such a quality variation between one sealed bag of ketchup and the next, presumably from the same supplier?) When one of these conditions is true, I grab a handful of ketchup packets instead.
I need a handful of ketchup packets to substitute for two or three pumps from the dispenser because the packets are so small. Obviously someone at Heinz, having decided that customers wanted a less-messy way to grab a handful of ketchup, had to decide at what volume to quantize it. But why is an individual ketchup so small? Ketchup is not so expensive that I (or anyone else of whom I can think) shepherd it by the milliliter. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever asked for or been given quantized ketchup by any measurement more precise than the aforementioned handful. I certainly have never eaten a meal for which I wanted more than zero ketchup, but fewer than three.
So is there a market I’m missing for small amounts of ketchup? A ketchup underground? I’m baffled because increasing the size of one packet by even fifty percent would reduce the number of packets by a third, which would lower packaging overhead for producers (but not the price; I’m paying for the ketchup, not the little plastic envelopes), and be less annoying for me since I’d be able to spend less time opening my food and more time enjoying it.
