The Shelf Audit Files No. 22 — Cheap Beats Expensive

At the beauty counter there is a little hair mask that runs seventy-five dollars for a tube holding less than two ounces — about forty-four dollars an ounce. Down the aisle at the drugstore there is a jar that does the same kind of job for under a dollar an ounce. This book lines up six of those matchups so you can see exactly where the money goes. 

It turns on one word. When we say a six dollar jar beats a twenty-nine dollar bottle, we mean it beats it on the one thing that can actually be proven: the price per ounce. Not that the cheap one works better on your hair — that is your hair's call, and this book never makes it. What a product costs is math, and the math is printed right there on the back of the bottle. 

Some of the cheap picks here are Black-owned and some are not, and for these six pages that is not the axis. The axis is what you pay per ounce, and it is the one number most of us never stop to look at.