There are both pros and cons to listing a product as having 20/40 servings. I noticed that companies started doing this with much greater frequency about 3-4 years ago. Now, it is common. The "pro" is that it makes the product look like it has a lot of servings. This helps with perceived value and boosts sales. The "con" is that people will leave reviews after trying a "40" (i.e. half-powered) serving size and then fail to state that they only took a half-serving, which is what it is really designed to be.
I just had a customer do this with Stage-3Z (a few months ago). He posted a review (on another board) and said that he had to take "4 servings at once" to get good results, when in reality he was using 1/4 of a FULL serving. I have the product listed as containing 20-80 servings (because there is significant variance in how it affects people), but he rated it based on the "80" serving size. Of course, I came into the thread and explained that he was actually taking just 1/4 of a FULL serving, but had I not done that, a bunch if people would've went away thinking that Stage-3Z doesn't work without taking 4X the recommended serving size.
Unfortunately, the general consumer doesn't do math when purchasing products. Rather than determining the total amount of ingredients (per bottle) relative to price, they make their assessment by comparing the number of servings relative to price. This gives great incentive for companies to list their product's as 20/40. I can't blame these companies...because the truth is that most people automatically add value to a product if they see it contains 40 servings...and they automatically subtract value if they see it only has 20 servings.
If the consumer saw things for what they actually are (which is that "20/40" means 20 FULL servings and 40 HALF-servings), companies wouldn't be incentivized to list products as 20/40. They would just list them as 20. In reality, it's almost never financially feasible for a company to make a high-powered pre-workout product with 40 servings at a low-moderate price point. 10 years ago it would have been possible...because the overall dosages were much lower back then, but today the overall dosages and comprehensiveness of pre-workout products has increased dramatically. Therefore, if a company wants to continue selling these products, they either need to increase the price or reduce the number of servings. Some companies increase the price and continue to provide 30 servings, but most companies want to remain within the same price range. If a company wants to remain the same price range, they need to reduce the number of serving to 20 and then list the product as 20/40. There's no dishonesty here. It's up to the customer to read the label and see what each serving size provides relative to the price.
If you compare today's average pre-workout product to those of a decade ago, it's not even close. Sure, some of the older products contained crazy (often illegal) stims, but look at everything else. Look at the original Jacked3D. It was pretty much nothing but a stim-bomb. It got popular because it contained a bunch of DMAA and caffeine. Did it have any pump ingredients? Yes, but they were inferior and low-dosed. Did it have anything for recovery and growth? An undisclosed amount of creatine monohydrate and beta alanine, but not much else. It also contained a few other things, but they weren't very effective and the dose was pitiful. In short, it was nothing more than DMHA and caffeine with some creatine and beta alanine.
These days, pre-workout product category is very diverse. There's something for everyone. We still have the stim-crazy products, but they are (generally speaking) much more well-rounded, containing numerous categories of ingredients at efficacious doses. We also have the less stim-heavy products with unique blends of focus and mood enhancing compounds. And we also have the no-stim products. We have all kinds of unique stuff now and it will only continue to expand.
For anyone considering providing reviews for the new Oracle product, I would suggest trying the full serving prior to doing so, particularly if you felt that a half-serving wasn't strong enough for you. Or, at a minimum, leave a review for both the half and full servings. Either way, in my opinion, it's really not fair to the company to rate a product based on a half-serving without specifically stating that you only took a half-serving.
