Yet another good one. The SF Chronicle has gone from a quarter to a dollar in 15 years, and the Sunday has gone from $1.25 to $3.00 in the same time. People who don’t buy it weekly will actually startle when I ring it up, and think I’m joking. They look at the masthead, which says “$3.00,” and put it back.
Joe
There have been structural changes in the way that newspapers are financed, though, that make this sort of price rise very understandable.
15 years go, internet advertising was really in its infancy, and was orders of magnitude less developed than it is today. Back then, newspapers could charge more for regular advertisements than they do now, because their advertising customers weren’t spending so much of their budgets on internet advertising.
Even more important than regular, business advertising, though, has been the shift in personal, classified advertising. Before the internet, and before sites like Craigslist and eBay and real estate portals, newspapers made a huge amount of revenue from classified advertising. I remember advertising a couple of things back in the early 1990s, and paying 15 or 20 bucks for about three lines of text, lost somewhere in the middle of page G36, or something like that.
Now, i can sell those same items on Craigslist for free, with as much text as i want, accompanied by four color photographs. I can run it repeatedly, and people looking for my item can do a keyword search rather than scanning through pages of small, cramped text.
The loss of this revenue was incredibly significant for newspapers.
Tombstone pizzas are too expensive. They used to be like $2.50 but now they’re like $5 unless you can get them on sale. But even then they’re like $3.33. gotta stock up. not a bargain. It is very sad, for they are the best frozen pizzas. now I have to get the less good ones. Tony’s pizzas are ok, but they’re no Tombstone.
Yeah, I notice that the other day they were marked $5.99 at the big box grocer.
Tuna cans are getting smaller. I remember the first time I grabbed one of the smaller cans off the shelf it just felt off.
Granulated sugar. I used to be able to get 5lb on sale for $2. Now the packages are 4lb, and the lowest price I’ve seen in the past year is $2.50. That’s more than a 50% price increase!
Re: Grocery Shrink Ray - I have an old hand-written recipe (from the 80s) that calls for “a jar of peanut butter” but now I have to add a jar + some more to get the recipe to come out right.
Won’t they think of the peanut butter?!
Two that I have noticed are coffee and honey. Even the crap coffee is high and while I like the local honey it is getting to be priced out of my budget.
Honey has been affected not just by general price rises (transport, gas, inflation, etc.), but by some pretty serious problems with the bee population, a lot of which has affected honey producers. Less product combined with sustained demand means higher prices.
The gas station down the road from where I live used to sell 16 oz Cokes for 99 cents. When I went in there a couple of days ago to get one, though, I noticed that they now only give you 12 oz for 99 cents.
I track grocery prices by what I spend for the about the same stuff each week. Six months ago, I paid $100 for what I now pay $130-$140. I’ve even changed to store brands and stopped buying a few things and the total still climbs.
My income is Social Security. We are supposed to get COLAs each year, but for the last two we haven’t because housing prices have fallen. Old folks don’t buy too many houses each year so how does falling housing prices help us in any way?
Food, gas and healthcare have all risen. My husband has health insurance through work, so I won’t start Medicare until he retires. The insurace he has was free for him and $8 a pay period for me, when we got married 11 years ago, now it’s $129 per pay period.
I’ve noticed coffee too, at least in the supermarket. It’s been gradually increasing over the last two years. However, I’ve also noticed that Starbucks hasn’t raised the price of their regular brewed cup of coffee, as they did five years ago.
I get why beef prices are up and are probably going to go sky high later this year - the drought in Texas and other Midwestern states means that a lot of cattle are being killed off before the reach their sell weight. So, a glut of beef followed by a shortage.
But why the price increases on everything else? I could see it if gas prices were up (again), but they’ve been stable for nearly a year.
More and more, I’m wanting to produce my own food, but there’s precious little space for a garden at my house, absolutely no way to keep bees, and if I tried to keep a chicken or two for eggs, I think the neighbors would tar and feather me, and then run me out of town on a rail.
I may be in the minority here, but I’m in favor of “smaller” packaging, especially for “bad for me” choices like ice cream and cookies. Saves me some calories. I definitely don’t buy multiple packages or buy more frequently. I just get less.
The Walmart near me sells 20oz soda (are they really 20oz anymore these days? Maybe they’re those 16.9oz ones) for $1.79 - at the same time, the 2-liter bottles of these same drinks were selling for $1.00. Hmm.
I’m not especially opposed to smaller packaging, per se. I also recognize that companies sometimes need to raise prices in order offset greater costs and maintain profit levels.
But when smaller packaging is clearly introduced in an effort to try and slip a price rise past the consumer unnoticed, then i get annoyed about it. I’d prefer that they just raise the price.
Also, your self-control (or lack thereof) is not my problem. If i want a pint of ice-cream, then i’ll buy a pint of ice-cream. And when a company sells me less of something for the same price in an effort to disguise the price increase, i’ll do my best to stop buying that company’s product.
I feed Diamond Naturals chicken & rice too, and you’re still getting it cheaper than I do- it’s $27.99 for 40 lbs here. A bag lasts me 2-3 weeks. Rural King runs it on sale a dollar off a bag about once a month.
I am actually walking around the grocery store isles cursing to myself. As others have said the prices are out of control along with the shrinking sizes of everything. Take potato chips, at my local store it was two 12 oz bags for $5.00 now it’s two 10 oz bags for $7!! The games stores play with your head, 10 for 8, 7 for 12 with the unit price in very small print. I can’t stand the shrinking sizes you can’t even get an honest pound of anything, 16 oz has become the most ridiculous amounts 15 oz, 12, 13.5, 12.78, 11.77.
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
What I’ve noticed is that the unit price for Brand A will be per pound, and the unit price for Brand B is per ounce. They know that no one is going to take the time to work it out.
Like **FairyChatMom **said, it’s especially aggravating when a recipe calls for a certain size can or package, and that size no longer exists.
Once, during poker night, I noticed one friend had a coke in a “small stubby” can. I asked him about it and he said it was a diet-friendly (aka reduced serving size) 10 oz can, marketed to folks who don’t want to overindulge. I asked him how much it cost. He replied “Only fifty cents (at the local gas station)”.
I then went to go pour myself another mixed drink, using the 2-liter bottle of soda I bought at the grocery store for one dollar. I didn’t throw it in his face, but I saw by his facial expression he knew he had been duped.
There are quite a few snack products now that are sold in small, 100-calorie servings. They are, almost without exception, terrible value for money.