The answer is actually in the question. The questioner is accustomed to paying $10 for one gram. There was a time when the traditional "dime bag" was 1/10th ounce, or nearly three grams.
The $10 price point has "stuck," but the grocery shrink ray strikes all products. Remember when a $1 candy bar was twice today's size?
When I was a kid in the mid-70's a "lid" cost $25. A lid was a pound of weed. Both the quality and cost shot up in the next decade.
Disclaimer: I don't smoke pot, so this is second hand smoke, so to speak. But, there were so many hippies around where I grew up that I literally thought patchouli was what people smelled like when then hadn't bathed in a week.
I'm pretty sure a lid was an ounce. A pound for $25 is too low, during the 70s. That's enough for a High schooler to smoke 1 1-gram joint everyday for 2 school calendar years on just a couple of days worth of lunch money.
You are completely right hapless. A good comparison is a dime bag to a candy bar. What adds confusion is that a dime bag is generally thought of to contain 1 gram these days. But this is not a candy bar and is not marked by weight. You won't find a "gram for a dime" bag that actually contains a gram. Hence why dealers are called choppers. They have to know how much to chop and still make money. Illegal or not, it can still be a slim margin business so these are accepted business practices by both vendors and customers.
I can't imagine it would be terribly hard to find similarly-burning vegetation to dilute the amount of product in a fixed-weight bag at a level undetectable to the average buyer.
You can't just throw some similarly looking vegetation in there without the buyer noticing. You could throw in low-grade hemp, but that's just as hard to grow, so it's of no benefit to the dealer.
One thing you can do is to not dry it. The moisture will add a bit of weight, but probably not more than 5-10% more, depending.
I've read that, in the UK, unscrupulous dealers have been spraying their dried bud with sugared water to add weight. They've also been selling something FAR more dangerous called "grit weed", which has been impregnated with glass dust or microbeads that resemble Cannabis terpines or "crystals" and also add considerable weight, but is basically fiberglass when inhaled.
This is sort of built into the quality scaling tho. Properly dried (not too dry, not too wet) fetches a higher price than what the difference in weight for lower quality offers.
"You could throw in low-grade hemp, but that's just as hard to grow, so it's of no benefit to the dealer."
I am not sure about that. Shouldn't low-grade hemp be cheaper in areas where it can be grown legally? After all, the risk of losing a harvest to law enforcement is lower.
I remember when a candy bar was 1/2 today's size. Everywhere you go it's "supersized this" and "supersized that". Even snickers bars are 2" longer, 1/2" thicker, and 1/2" wider than they used to be.
Perhaps, I haven't purchased one since I stopped doing packaged foods, but I no longer notice the standard sized candy bars, the liquor store counters and grocery store check-out aisles seem to be filled only with the "king size" versions.
I actually noticed the opposite. A few days ago I had a craving for a snickers bar. I haven't had one in years. So I popped into my local 7-11 and I noticed that the candy bars all looked...smaller... than when I was a kid. There was no king size to be found. Anecdotal? Sure, but it does support what the poster was claiming.
Your point of reference has changed. My father was the biggest man in the world when I was 5 years old, now I feel like I could hollow out a leg and hide him in it.
The $10 price point has "stuck," but the grocery shrink ray strikes all products. Remember when a $1 candy bar was twice today's size?