It's a huge scam how companies have gotten away with acting like the "price" of a box of crackers is just some random number. It is better for customers to instead treat the prime unit as the cost per ounce, and the different sizes/form factors/etc as addons.

You can see this on amazon, too - among many other howlers which express their PMs extremely low, yet validated, estimate of the moral fiber of american free enterprise customers, they treat the "price lowest to highest" filter as meaning "total price" for item whose size naturally varies.

For items like "one vacuum cleaner" fair enough, "price lowest to highest" would have made sense. (if they hadn't gone out of their way not to classify the "item" itself with any filterable classifer from all the associated peripherals like extra wheels and whatnot which also show up, also technically sorted correctly in order of the numerical price, as if it ever would make sense to compare the price of a wheel to the price of a vacuum cleaner, (for people who set out that morning saying: "I'll either buy a vacuum or a wheel for one, that's it"?)

So this is completely intentional

One good thing about the US / CA system at a minimum is that we still have the law which requires them to include, along with the full item price, another number somewhere on the price tag for the price/weight. This isn't required to be standard, though, so they move it around by item type, off to the corner, or side, so it varies, and always lower down and smaller so it's hard to just have your eye go right to it.

It's actually the populations fault, though - companies will do whatever you let them get away with. If the average person

I'd bet that we can see the effect by looking at the rate of inflation of "fixed size and quality" items such as milk (always sold in units of 1 gallon); they will be easier for customers to notice price changes of, so their price rises will lag other types of item where companies can obfuscate the rate they're charging.

I do not hate free enterprise at all; but we should recognize that the smarter the customer, the more fair the marketplace.