Apparently food packaging shrinkage is a common complaint.
Padding under the strawberries to fool people. Size of pop tarts shrank. Nutterbutter went from 12 packs to 10 in the same box and price.
My cracker example is more noticeable because they’ve been six-packs before I was even born. Maybe the cracker size has changed without me noticing. I never looked that closely.
I prefer paying more for the same quantity. Do you feel cheated when the box is half full?
This ‘shrinkage’ seems to be a common way for companies to try to hide price increases.
Personally, I noticed it with potato chips. (My family business growing up.) When I was a kid, the twin-pack box contained 2 bags of chips, 8 ounces each, for 16 ounces to the box.
Now those are down to 5-1/2 ounces each. They have introduces a triple-pack, with 3 bags inside the box. But that total 16-1/2 ounces, only a bare half-ounce over the old twin-pack.
I have some recipes passed down to me from my mother, even some that came from Grandma. But sometimes following them doesn’t work out quite right, because of size changes. The recipe says 1 can of canned tuna – but with current shrunken cans, the result is rather pasta-heavy and short on tuna.
I read cake recipes outta boredom and to torture myself.
Lately I’m reading how to doctor up cake mixes. All the sites have a warning, cake mixes have shrunk so that even a 9×13 pan is too large. I guess they’ll eventually adjust to this new size.
Yep. Everything is shrinking even more than it already has. We been getting cheated on pounds of coffee, sugar and flour for quite a few years.
You’ll just have suck it up or buy more than you need to get the amount you want.
Speaking of shrinkage weren’t the tin cans of coffee originally a full 16 ounces (1 pound) of coffee? Because I noticed the other day most were only TEN ounces.
A funny thing. I hadn’t had these in years and years, but just yesterday on a 400 mile drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles I bought a pack of these orange little guys. They weren’t as salty as I remember. Pretty sure the recipe has changed since 50-some years ago when I first bought them. I’m 64 now.
IME no they don’t. Not since they really were 16oz. At least under US labeling law that AFAIK hasn’t been rescinded by random executive order. Yet.
But traditionally all packaged coffee came in 1lb and 3lb cans. Some brands also sold a half-height 8 oz can. There was zero variation in sizing.
So the words “pound of coffee” or “one pound can” became an idiom more than a reference to actual capacity.
Then during the severe inflation of the late 1960s, suddenly the “one pound can” held 15, then 13, and eventually 12 ounces of coffee. Many folks still used the old name even though they knew it no longer was accurate. “Honey, pick up a pound of coffee on your way home tonight, please” meant “Buy the can size that’s now less than a real pound but used to be a real pound.”
Those cans and their lids were kind of like takeout containers are now: a limitless source of “free” handy containers to reuse for other things. So they loomed sorta large in the ecosystem of a 1960s middle class household. Everybody drank coffee and the percolators of the day used a lot of course grounds per pot. So buying another can of coffee was a weekly or more often task.
I will never forgive the ice cream industry for shrinking their standard package - I suspect they did it nationwide in the middle of the night - from a half gallon (64 oz.) to the now-standard 48 oz.
They thought we weren’t paying attention, but they underestimated my relationship with ice cream.
Yes, a half-gallon of ice cream is now 3 pints. And I’m quite sure the price didn’t decrease by 25 percent.
For many years I ate instant oatmeal for breakfast during the winter months. 10 packages in a box, and I ate two per serving, so a box would last a work-week of 5 days. But sometime in the last 9 years since I retired, the box now contains 8 packages. And I’m quite sure the price hasn’t decreased 20 percent.
I feel like 12 oz has become the modern “pound.” I’m sure it happens with a bunch of products, but I see it especially with bags of shredded cheese and ground or whole bean coffee. (And, as previously noted, sometimes it’s even 11 or 10 oz.)
Sorta. Some ag commodities have significant price fluctuations. e.g. eggs when we’re having chicken flu problems. Others move up and down with the seasons. e.g. At the height of harvest, cob corn is nearly free. A month on either side it’s 3x as expensive. And 6 months later it’s hard to find.
All of that is very different from general consumer price inflation. That is always a one-way ratchet. Any time general prices start declining = “deflation” the economy promptly crashes. It’s a monetary disaster that governments all over the world go to great lengths to avoid. To the point of encouraging a certain amount of inflation precisely to ensure they never miss low enough that inflation touches zero or goes negative into deflationary territory.
The price of e.g. potatoes or wheat flour may move upwards at different rates over a span of years, so the relative price of e.g. frozen French fries may change compared to the price of packaged you-bake biscuits. But in each case, when the manufacturer decides to implement a packaging change for shrinkflation, that’ll be a one-way move. All that differs is how often and how big it happens.
The general public is dumb enough to react to the per-package price, not the per each or per oz price. Until / unless that changes, shrinkflation will be with us.
35 years ago, when I was at my first job, working at a major personal-care products company, the industry-standard size for bottles of shampoo and conditioner was 16 fluid ounces. At some point in the early '90s, shrinkflation started, and bottles gradually got downsized to 15 ounces.
Today, most major manufacturers use a different standard size, 375 ml, which translates to 12.6 fluid ounces.
Bob Clarke and Don REilly was writing (and drawing) about The Incredible Shrinking Candy Bar in Mad magazine back in 1962. This has been going on for a LONG time
