Now, the French supermarket chain Carrefour is exposing examples of it for shoppers, with labels on shelves reading: “This product has seen its volume or weight fall and the effective price from the supplier rise.” Dozens of products have been hit with the labels since Monday, [according to] Reuters.
“The aim in stigmatizing these products is to be able to tell manufacturers to rethink their pricing policy,” Stefen Bompais, director of client communications at Carrefour, told the news agency. Carrefour will soon enter annual price negotiations with Nestlé, [Unilever], [PepsiCo], and other owners of well-known brands.
Among the shrinkflation examples it’s showing shoppers are Guigoz infant formula, produced by Nestlé, and a bottle of sugar-free peach-flavored Lipton iced tea, produced by PepsiCo.
Despite the cost of raw materials falling, consumers goods companies have not been cooperating with efforts to cut prices, Carrefour CEO Alexandre Bompard has argued.
The French, of course, are Commies. Information like that is hidden from USians. Here, we have to use our memories. I had not bought a bag of potato chips in years. Decided to indulge once, last year. The store brand chips, that used to come in a 14 or 16oz bag, now come in a 7.7oz bag. A “half gallon” of ice cream is now 1.5 quarts.
So the price remains the same and the quantity is smaller, or the quantity remains the same and the price is higher. The result is equivalent, except that the smaller package approach might be more accessible for lower income shoppers.
If the product is junk food the smaller package is a health benefit.
I commented a few months ago that here in Portugal I saw two almost identical sausage packages side by side. One made more glorious claims than the other but both had the same price. The Glorious Sausage was smaller.
Exactly what I was thinking. The cost to make and handle the half size bag is going to be pretty close to the old 16oz bag, outside of the cost of the bag material itself (fraction of a cent?) So, as you said, people pay proportionally more for the package and handling of it, then for the contents.
Of course, if they financed groceries the same way they finance cars, then they could play games with the monthly payments. The only way people can afford the “average” car today, which costs about $48,000, is they can now finance it over seven or eight years, instead of only three, to keep the monthly payment “affordable”.
That is not what the FED really is doing. Not by much that is. Instead the FED is taking your equity values down until corporations prove themselves as important in economies of scale production in the US and Mexico. You may be out of luck for much of the next year. Most people will keep their jobs or find a replacement job easily.
Shrinkflation capitalizes on the American Public’s long slide into racism, ignorance and innumeracy. It won’t be long before they’re blaming it on blacks and Hispanics, rather than corporate price gouging.
It’s always blamed on the workers, or the government. In my wanderings today, I walked past a defunct ladder factory. The company went toes up in 2020. I remember a honcho from the company blaming their failure on the government ordered shutdown. Thing is, the company only made wood ladders, not aluminum. How many people buy wood ladders anymore?
I looked up the news report on the company’s closing. Seems they did start offering a fiberglass ladder line along the way, but, as the report says, they were the only company left in the country, trying to sell wood ladders. But their failure was all the government’s fault.
