Re:Why Warren Buffett Just Bought Duracell
by moreati on Saturday November 15, 2014 @05:03AM
(#8611335)
It sounds like you know the history. Why are zinc-carbon batteries called 'heavy-duty'?
Re:Why Warren Buffett Just Bought Duracell
by tanzam75 on Saturday November 15, 2014 @11:28AM
(#8611986)
Sorry, I gave the wrong chemistry.
The carbon-chloride battery is labeled as "heavy-duty," because it has greater capacity than the carbon-zinc battery ("general-purpose").
When alkaline batteries were invented, the older chemistry continued to be sold as heavy-duty. This leads to the strange situation where the heavy-duty battery has less capacity than the other batteries you find on the shelf.
If you bought the cheapest battery on the shelf, then it probably wasn't an alkaline battery. A heavy-duty battery (carbon-zinc) has half the capacity of an alkaline.
If you buy Duracell, you know you will get at least an alkaline battery. Duracell simply does not sell heavy-duty batteries, hence the brand name: the durable cell. It's mostly a matter of brand positioning, rather than technology.
Rayovac uses one brand for both alkaline and heavy-duty batteries, which cheapens their brand when a consumer buys the wrong type and all the batteries die a quick death. Energizer addresses this problem by selling heavy-duty batteries under the Everready brand.