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Some readers need a chill pill, and for good reason: The pill bottles they’ve bought recently are half-full at best. Four such bottles, with readers’ complaints, are shown below. Another gripe was prompted by a three-bottle pack of the heartburn pill omeprazole, bought at CVS. “Each bottle contains only 14 tablets,” a reader told us. “This has to win an award for wasteful packaging.” Right you are.
Why the waste? “We try to use the same size bottle for different products, for cost-saving,” a customer-service rep from supplement maker Nature Made told us. “Sometimes the pills are bigger, so the bottle will be full.” A Bayer rep blamed the size of that company’s low-dose-aspirin bottle on the amount of information the Food and Drug Administration requires it to convey. Curious, because the Bayer bottle below is pretty puny—and still mostly empty.
Larger packages and bottles can grab a shopper’s attention, says Dave Wendland, vice president of Hamacher Resource Group, which designs how products are organized on drugstore shelves. “That could turn into more sales for the manufacturer,” he adds.
The number of pills is stated on the package, and yet, “I know I’m buying 100 tablets and not a serving of something that I might expect to fill the box,” a Bayer buyer wrote. “But really, it does create an expectation. And what about wasted space/cost in shipping and packaging?”
One plus for big bottles: They’re easier to recycle than small ones, which may not survive the sorting process, says David Cornell, technical consultant for the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers.
Reader complaint
“A friend recommended this to
help me get to sleep … I was too angry to sleep after opening the bottle!”
Reader complaint
“The package is nearly twice as big as the bottle, and the bottle is two-thirds empty.”
Reader complaint
“You can see that the pills included fill up not even half the bottle. The other more-than-half of the bottle was filled with cotton. Sigh.”
Reader complaint
“When I poured all tablets into one bottle,” said a buyer of three Bayer bottles, “it still wasn't full.”
Did you know?
Some bottles must accommodate moisture-absorbing synthetic cotton, says a representative at the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. But why so much?
*This article originally appeared in Consumer Reports magazine.
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