Shrinkflation is largely a myth. Items do not shrink relative to inflation, in fact the majority of claimed products are larger now than they were 50 years ago.
People often cite certain chocolate bar sizes with comparing the size today to that from the 90s. It’s not a fair comparison and not an example of shrinkflation. Mars bars have dropped 20% in size since the 90s but still are 4% larger today then when they originally came out.
Neither are small boxes of cereal. When I worked at Wal-Mart 9 years ago those same thin boxes gave me grief when putting them out on the shelves.
i see milk tasting almost like water like skimmed milk, as well as some juices i used to be able to buy, fillings in sweets like crackers and wafers being almost as thin as paper or outright stopping being sold and replaced by cookies using drops for a filling, yogurt being replaced by “milk drink” (yogurt is thicker and slower to flow down, i can tell the difference, but the label also changes, idk the english term for “bebida láctea”), a lot of sweets and bags reducing from 800g down to 600g, down to 400g while keeping the same price, packaging turning opaque and non-transparent, potato chips and other salt foods being filled 1/5th, down from 1/3rd, even instant noodles going from 150g down to 80g in the past decade.
only things that aren’t changed as much is what i know to be the very basic things that people in here uses and cooks every day, that being rice (5kg), beans (5 and 1kg), pasta (500g all variants), sugar and salt (1kg), etc.
mostly depends on the country you are in (i’m in Brazil), but the point is that it doesn’t stop at the chocolate bars.
Milk is generally a regulated good and cannot be watered down like that. The same is true with all dairy. It’s sad that you live in a country that does not offer such food protection.
Chips have always been filled like that. The nitrogen in the bag keeps the food fresh and acts as a way to keep them from damage via transport. Lays had reduced thier weight though, which ended up being 5 less chips per bag. The bags are still almost twice the size they were than 35 years ago.
In Canada the most popular brand of Ramen is Mr. Noodles. It’s been 85g for the last 20 years, maybe more.
After seeing so, so many french brands and retailers remain in Russia after that country invaded Ukraine (the rest of it, as they occupied Crimea already), I just started assuming all large french companies are complete total shits and have been boycotting them since then.
Were I live there a lot of large french retailers, so this actually has made a significant difference in my purchasing habits.
Eh, they’re better than most, but they’re not all that great either. People Make Game made a very interesting video on them: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
Good for them. I made tacos for the first time in ages a couple of days ago, and I could not believe the size of the shells now. I would have called them child-sized, they were so small. It’s disgusting.
Motherfucker, have you never had a big ass burrito? The real Mexicans make their own tortillas, and if they feel like it, they’ll make one big enough to be used as a bedroll.
To be fair, most likely of these ‘foods’ look like complete junk. Over-processed shit. Huge mark-ups on what amounts to packaging and cheap fat/sugar/industrial flavours.
If only smart glass is as popular as mobile phones. When Google introduced their smart glass, I dreamt of a day when a price history overlay is displayed when looking at a barcode, like how Keepa is doing for Amazon.
I also like German price display which has effective price, as in Eur per liter for drinks, making it dead simple to compare products. A smart glass will make it available everywhere.
Back to Carrefour, I really like that they are pushing pro consumer actions. However, we all know too well that they won’t do the same when it’s their products which are shrinking. Still better than no action though.
It is but it does nothing to curb shrinkflation in my experience.
I’m trying to think of a way to mandate this kind of notification but I can’t think of a way to do it that could be both clear and mandated. Perhaps if the price per changes there needs to be a history listed on the label.
One big problem with it is that in the short-term it discourages sales, so groceries aren’t incentivised to do it except as a stunt like this, so they won’t want the notices to be prominent. Ultimately they still want you to buy the stuff because then they make money.
Yeah I mean a price per unit history over the past X period, at least a year if I had my way, so if it changes a lot you end up with a clear list. That’s actually not bad. Over time people would learn to read it and be educated about it and there might be more public pressure against it.
Works for basic ingredients, but for even basic “preprocessed” items (mixed nuts, pizza, sauces…) they can just change the recipe, put more of the cheap and less of the good stuff. The cheapest product per weight often has a worse quality. Sunflower oil instead of more healthy alternatives etc…
Same for me, I got so used to it.
The only annoyance is when (mostly brand) stuff is purposefully displayed in a different unit (e.g. washing powder in washing loads instead of kg). But imho that kind of obfuscation speaks for itself…
I don’t really know what google has said, I wasn’t really referring to them, but AR is plenty used in industry already.
There’s just some way to go left for consumer use, but we are getting there. 5G networks are also supposed to help our with the possibility, due to their increased capabilities.
Consumer grade AR is being worked on, and it is expected to become a big thing eventually.
I was referencing Google Glass, which was Google’s attempt to make a consumer grade AR, a decade ago. They also said that they would have Glass commercially rolled out within the decade. It failed, not for any technical reason, but because it looks stupid and it makes everyone around the person using AR feel awkward. It was universally ridiculed online, has no use case and it has no consumer market. As you said, it only has uses in industrial applications, because factory workers don’t have to care about fashion or aesthetics in general in their work place. But people are already uncomfortable with everyone having a camera and microphone in their pockets at all times. Now imagine that every single second of your day was potentially recorded, sent back to Google, analyzed, used to train an AI, minified to tailor ads to manipulate your behavior, which would be easy because you have a screen glued to your eye 24/7 already; and also potentially having it all shared with authorities without your consent, along with the faces and data of every single acquaintance and stranger you interacted with without their consent…yeah, that doesn’t sound like another step in the privacy dystopia we live in already.
But Apple is making the Vision Pro now, I’m sure a couple million of gullible consumers will shell out money for that. And maybe the AR era will finally come to us.
Those are all technical reasons though. Aesthetics are limited by the technology. And the glasses calling home more than it should is also a technical and regulatory reason.
It can absolutely be done while sidestepping all the concerns. Or better yet, have glasses running FOSS software.
But sure, those concerns are reasonable, but they are not fundamental to the technology itself, but to our societal reality. That stuff won’t get fixed by avoiding technology, only by societal change. And you can be sure that all kinds of stuff will be pushed into people if that societal change doesn’t happen, no matter whether it’s AR or not. (Just look at the recent trend of enshittification of everything).
Pick a lane, is it “limited by the technology” or are concerns and limitations “not fundamental to the technology”. Both statements cannot be true at the same time.
AR, just like VR, have problems for which the technological solutions are either not physically possible in reality as we understand it, or the practical solutions completely nullify any cool factor the technology has to offer, or the price to overcome them is so high that they would never be financially feasible to become a commercial product. Like other futuristic fantasies like flying cars, and holographic interfaces, they sound cool in paper, are shit in reality.
They are technically feasible, but not in their ideal form. You keep equating their ideal form to their real form, and that’s just a fallacy. The real XR technologies do not make good consumer products. The real XR that exists today that are in place and used, are in industrial settings, not in consumer electronics settings. And they might never come out of there because their ideal forms, don’t exist. No matter how many technological strides you make, you still have a goofy crystal glasses or bulky 1kg of crystal and silicon in your face, that will make you sweat and strain your neck in under an hour. That limitation will never go away, for it’s already at the tail end of physical possibilities.
Saying that XR technologies don’t make good consumer products is weird considering consumer VR products already exist and are used but alright.
…and why do you think that AR glasses have to be at least 1kg in weight?? That’s like saying laptops (or smartphones for that matter) will never be a mainstream product because nobody would want to lug around a 30kg machine. The smartphone I’m typing this on already weights just 150g.
We are still quite far from the limits of physics, and there are plenty of upcoming technologies which will allow to reduce weight.
I know only one case where this shrinkflation thing was stopped - one beer company decided to sell 0.4l cans, because “that’s what the customers want”. It turned out pretty fast that wasn’t what their customers wanted :)
I’d love to see this naming and shaming becoming a standard. I want to know if the product I’m buying has changed and while I try to do this myself, it can be tricky to keep track of all the products I buy and it’s not like I’m scanning the exact weight every time and memorizing it, just that it’s generally the same weight. These scumbag companies are always trying to sneak by all these changes over time, it’s great to finally get a spotlight shining on it. If some sort of legislation can be made to force companies to note changes in products made in the last 6 months on the label, that would be great.
“What do you mean I should put the same barcode on these 2 clearly diffrent 1.25 litter coke bottle that we stopped selling a year ago and the new 1.15 litter bottle?
That’s absurd!
Also, fuck you.”
Exactly my thought for a long time. A law which mandates companies to…I don’t know…put on a label, occupying at least 1/3 of the whole packaging with giant red/white font to say at least for 3-6 months: “The net weight/contenct was reduced by 15%.”
Geat idea! There’s no reason this couldn’t be done everywhere by citizens with access to sticker printing services… I’ve spotted a few products myself in the past year and wouldn’t be against sticking some labels on them to warn my fellow shoppers :)
I would LOVE to see more of this. Looking at you GATORADE, with your half-inch-deep plastic rim on the bottom and new hourglass bottle shape. 32oz sized bottles are 28oz now and MORE expensive. Fuck shrinkflation to death.
Yeah for some reason drinks seem the most effected by shrinkflation, I hate going to the drinks aisles these days because everything seems so overpriced, even just regular tap/spring water
And it works, so the quotes around “preserve” are absolute bullshit.
And before you accuse me of being a shill for big chip, try putting both a sealed bag of your chips and an unsealed but folded closed bag of chips in your backpack with your laptop and books for a day walking around, and see which one has larger, more complete chips at the end of the experiment.
It does its intended job of protecting chips very well.
It also allows producers to visually conceal how much product is actually in the bag. Weirdly enough they’re still using the same size bags instead of a smaller, more efficient ones that would save manufacturing and transportation costs.
Tbf, their stated purpose is to bring attention to the price discrepancy on diminished products. I would assume they believe their pricing is fair in that respect.
Yeah. I’m old and have been on the internet since well before the creation of both Pepe and based. That’s why I still use this term. I think we should try to reclaim these things - if we let them change our behavior, we lose.
Fuckkkk thatttt, pepe is still alive and well on twitch, and racists are not tolerated (at least in any of the channels I frequent). They can pry that frog from my cold, dead hands.
I’ve slowly realized that many people on the internet use it casually, but like you, I always assumed they were alt-right (new main right) or libertarian at a minimum for a long time.
I get it’s to shame the brands. But do the French not have unit prices? That’s how I determine the better prices among different brands regardless of package size.
That method is very useful but it wouldn’t help you notice if every single company making a specific kind of product increased their prices the same amount (or reduced quantity)
You mean if they display price per gram/kg/oz/ml etc? It’s irrelevant whether they do or not, that’s not the point. They are comparing the price against the same product before , not against other similar products from other brands. It doesn’t matter if Lipton Iced Tea is the cheapes iced tea brand per litre, it matters that they reduced the product size compared to what they used to
Right, but the before price is no longer available to me now. When I’m at the grocery store, I have to make decisions on today’s prices. My choices are to buy brand A, B, or C. Or I can buy nothing. Or I can go to another store and hope for lower prices.
The company making the product likely has their own costs that have increased, such as increased labor and/or materials. In an inflationary environment, I cannot reasonably expect every company to maintain the same prices indefinitely, the company would then be forced to sell the product at a loss, which would lead to bankruptcy of the company.
Companies could increase prices, and/or decrease quantity arbitrarily to increase profits. But that’s where competition with the other brands would keep them in check.
Yes, you are right in what you say but are still missing the point. The point isn’t to inform the consumer about the best price for an item now, and it’s not to help regulate the price of an item against other similar items. That is not the goal here. If that happens or not is irrelevant.
The point here is to shame a company who is now selling less of their product but at the same price, without making and advertisement about it.
Unlike what you mentioned, a lot of the base costs for production of these items have not increased and or have actually become cheaper, therefore resorting to shrinking the product and not shrinking the price is a morally questionable practice. This is why the name and shame move is happening.
A lot of consumers buy by brand out of habit, and we’ve seen countless times stories of “I went for my cereals like always, the box looked the same, the price was the same, but it actually weighed a third less and didn’t realise until I got home and opened it. Had I realised earlier I would have bought a different brand”. So the second objective of this move is to warn the consumer about these changes in value that are not as obvious at a glance.
I mean, I understood that part. My first sentence was:
I get it’s to shame the brands
I guess I’m probably more vigilant than most about looking at the unit price, which would reveal these kinds of price changes vs competitors.
I think it’s an unreasonable expectation that companies will advertise they’ve raised prices or shrunk packaging. The shrinkflation is deceptive for sure, but I’ve just come to expect that’s what companies will do, especially in an inflationary environment.
Unit prices are easy to remember when you buy a single product. I bet you know the price of gas per unit immediately. What was the price of Pepsi per liter today? What was the price of Coke per liter? There are dozens and dozens of soda products alone you would have to memorize. And that’s just soda.
I applaud a store using its data to communicate to customers how prices have changed. We should do this everywhere.
They’ll probably only do it to pull a stunt like this to improve their negotiating power like they are here, because if they left it up all the time it would discourage sales.
Unit prices shows you the cost per g or ml. This would show changes to historical pricing that you may not notice otherwise.
A product could still be cheapest per unit or in the middle but the increase wasn’t noticed as they changed the packaging and volume of the product. Strange sizes also make comparison difficult without the actual ticket.
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