Size matters, and sometimes you just have to ship the big stuff in

Continuing on from my popular 'everything is bigger in America' thread from previous years, I have a new 'everything is smaller in Britain' discovery to share.

TLOML regularly asks his mother to send drugstore items to us here. She very kindly shops for him, packs it up and ships it over - which is more than a little inconvenient, I imagine. She's a good mum, of course, and doesn't complain.

But I do. 'You know, you can buy all the same stuff here. You don't need to ask your poor mother to go to all this trouble,' I say.

Then the shipment arrives, and we do the side-by-side comparison, and I eat my words.

One of these body lotion bottles is from a UK retailer, and cost about a fiver, so we thought it was a fairly standard size. The other was sent from the US and cost also about a fiver, and is probably considered a standard size there. Can you guess which is which?

As for the painkillers, no prizes for spotting the tiny Boots packet, which cost less than £1. The giant bottle of US painkillers cost ten times as much but will last thirty times as long.

Sometimes, bigger really is better. That's clearly not the case with fruit, or cars. But where drugstore essentials are concerned, our American cousins are really onto something. And thankfully for us, TLOML's mum is kind enough to keep shipping on request.

We really do have the best of both worlds: sensibly sized apples and access to enormous bottles of body lotion.