Case on the record
A quarter-pound of shrimp, gone, bag after bag.
Walmart Great Value shrimp: 2 lb bag, a quarter-pound short. Is that legal?
Not a one-off. WSB-TV (Atlanta) covered a Georgia man's viral weigh-ins of grocery items, and the one that repeated was Walmart's Great Value shrimp: bag after 2 lb bag, home-scale readings came in about a quarter-pound (4 oz) light. One short bag is an anomaly. The same shortfall showing up again on the next bag is a pattern.
Great Value shrimp, 2 lb bag
Labeled
32 oz
Actual
28 oz
Short by
4 oz
Legal Limit
1.12 oz
Short by 4.000 oz, which exceeds the legal tolerance of 1.12 oz for this quantity.
This is computed against NIST Handbook 133, Table 2-5 (the general net-weight tolerance table), the same public standard every state weights & measures agency uses. See how we source this data.
Frozen shrimp is often sold with a glaze of ice for preservation, and how much of that ice should count toward the labeled net weight is a separate, disputed question the creator also raised. That's a different issue from the net-weight tolerance check below, which just compares the label to the thawed, drained weight. Multiple repeated shortfalls on the same product are more informative than a single package.
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