What this guy found in Austria is actually illegal under EU consumer protection law.
Misleading price reduction claims
Price reduction claims such as “was € 50, now € 25” can be misleading if the initial selling price (known as “anchor price”) has been inflated. In all EU countries traders are obliged, when offering a discount, to indicate the lowest price applied to the item at least 30 days before the announcement of the price reduction. This information allows you as a consumer to assess whether the discount is genuine or not.
Also, in the EU price tags in stores must also tell the price per standard unit of measurement, so you can compare different products regardless of package size.
You still need to notice the increase, hence Carrefour’s warning.
That’s extremely nice to have. I whish that this would apply to all product categories. Sometimes products from the same category are of different measurement units. E.g., one is in liter and one is in grams.
How long until the Académie Française issues a “correct” French neologism to replace “shrinkflation”, the way they decreed, i.e., that email should be called “courriel”?
If memory serves, “courriel” was actually French Canadian (and I actually find it a smart translation). The Académie Française suggested “mél” at the time, which means even less of a thing and only sounds roughly close to “mail”.
I have nothing good to say about the Académie, but, to be fair, “mél” is meant as abbreviation. Like, for business cards or email signatures, where stuff like “Tél.” was written. Still ridiculously bad.
Don’t expect the Académie to act fast, act properly, or even act. Anyway, it’s already here, réduflation, from Québec. fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Réduflation
French supermarket Carrefour has put stickers on its shelves this week warning shoppers of “shrinkflation” - where packet contents are getting smaller while prices are not.
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