The reason is obvious. A lot of people just shop by price. They look at the shelf and buy whatever has the lowest price without thinking about the amount of product they’re getting. The first company that reduces its size by 20% and lowers its price by 15% starts beating the competition and they’ve got to follow or lose.
FairyChatMom, could you ask to have your paint “tinted” white? If you explain to the clerk that the stated company policy is to bring it up to an even five gallons by tinting, they might help you.
On another note: in grocery stores, most of the tags indicate a “price per unit” so that you can compare different products for which is actually the best value. Only, in my local stores, the “units” on the same range of products vary wildly from sticker to sticker so that it’s really not effective. For example, one sack of flour will be 99¢ / oz., another will be $2.49 / serving, another will be $3.59 / cup. (Prices and examples completely imaginary.) I always wonder if this is deliberate or just a lack of standardization.
We had to stop in a smaller hardware chain today, and I decided to look at their paint. They carry a different brand from Lowe’s, and every single 5 gallon bucket I looked at said it contained 640 oz - FIVE GALLONS!! :eek:
Gee, am I getting a little obsessive?? I will admit that even with the shorted amount, the paint I bought was cheaper than the others I’ve looked at. But still, it’s the principle of the thing, right? Of course right.
OK, enough about the stupid paint. I’m still pissed about shrinking quantities.
Ah, but sometimes the shrinking package can have benefits, at least for some of us. I work in a grocery store as a night stocker and it’s my job to toss huge bags of dog food on the shelves. Purina sold Dog Chow in 40lb bags that ripped rather easily (a big pain in my ass, believe me.) Recently they changed the bag from heavy paper to a sort of weavy-plasticky material that is sturdier. Evidently the new material is MUCH lighter because now instead of tossing 40 lb bags, I only have to lift 37.5 pounds. Since usually I stock twenty or more of these every night, I figure that’s fifty pounds less work on my back.
So see? This works out for me…especially since I don’t have a dog and I’m not the consumer who is being cheated. Now cat food, on the other hand…
Back in September 2006, Charmin toilet paper became narrower by about 5%. I wouldn’t have noticed but for the fact that my store had an old package and a new one on the shelf at the same time, and the latter was clearly a bit shorter.
Actually, depending on where you live, this may actually be Mario Cuomo’s fault.
Why does anyone expect food prices to de steady? It involves growing a crop, you know.
Note thread title, please.
I feel your pain, everyone. There’s this internet message board that I subscribe to… the price never changes, but there’s less and less worthwhile content every year.
It’s a joooooooooooke! Somebody had to make it! I kept waiting for someone else to do it…
I mentioned over in the current minirants thread a couple of weeks ago that Tropicana redesigned the packaging for its orange juice. Of course, in order to accomodate this stylish new bottle, the size had to shrink from 96 oz to 89 oz. But of course the price didn’t change.
I get pissed off by magazine subscription invitations that offer a spectacular rate and then, in tiny print, say “plus postage per issue.” This has been coming up in the last couple of years. Since when does a magazine subscription not include the cost of mailing? Why don’t they just tell you how much it costs to subscribe?
Well, yeah. I know, I guess. 
But it still answers to “www.dejanews.com,” and that’s what I’ve got in my bookmarks. Just never got out of the habit of referring to it as ‘dejanews.’
And yeah, you’re probably right about the binaries. I only use it to catch up on a couple of text-type newsgroups very occasionally (It amazes me sometimes what a relatively short time ago my online life was dominated by Usenet (pre-Web) and how little I pay attention to it these days).
That’s a pretty awesome quote. Is it original?
This isn’t really a new phenomenon. When I was a kid in the mid 70’s, chocolate and sugar prices soared. Candy bar prices stayed the same while the bars did the Incredible Shrinking Product trick until they got to about 1.5 times the size of the current miniatures. Then the companies figured out that their customers were unhappy and that they’d be better off increasing the size of the product and just raising their prices from 10 cents to 25.
The other stuff, liked can goods and so forth, I don’t quite get. It would seem to me to take a lot of time, money and equipment changes to keep changing the sizes of your containers and packaging. Just raise the damned price and get it over with.
Speaking of price increases, I recently noted that the price of my favorite Tombstone pizzas has gone through the roof. From roughly $4 (I bought ‘3 for $9.99’ a couple of weeks ago), to $5.68 each last Friday. That’s a 42% price increase! Ouch!
And now the U.S. Mint is working on cheaper alloys with which to make nickels and pennies, so we can use the same old money to buy the shrunken products.
Makes sense. :rolleyes:
(not rolling my eyes at anyone here, just at the whole stupid situation.)
This kind of thing happens frequently with beauty products as well - I (am about to quit) work(ing) at Walgreens, and last year Pantene did a huge promotion with their new package design, supposed New! Improved! Formula!, etc. Of course, what they didn’t mention with the new packages and so forth was that they were dropping the amount in the package by about 1.5 oz, in addition to the price increase.
Hrm. Glad I wasn’t the only one noticing this. Local, family-run supermarket has been selling frozen pizzas for 2 bucks a piece since time immemorial. Last week, prices raised to 3 for 10 bucks. Sixty-six and some-odd percent price raise. Annoying to say the least.
You guys don’t have tags with comparative prices? Here in Sweden, every product has two prices listed, one per container or one per kilogram/liter/other suitable unit of measurement. I always go by the second.
No. Fucking. Way. It can not be over seven years ago.
Toilet paper is an interesting one. Apparently, they’ve figured out that they can fool people into thinking they’re getting the same amount by making the cardboard inner tube larger, so it takes up the same amount of shelf space, even though there’s less product on the roll.
That’s the real problem, I reckon: reducing the amount of product, but not changing the size of the packaging. Dial soap bars have gone from 4.5 ounce bars to 4 ounce bars, but the packaging is the same size. Cereal is really bad about this, too, because everyone expects cereal to settle in the box, so who notices a little more air?
The new compressed sawdust coiner is perfected, so now we can have wooden nickels. Better yet you can easily keep track of your winter heating costs by burning them directly in your furnace instead of paying for natural gas.