I used to have a book from the late 1800’s that frequently gave measurements in terms of price. Recipes would include measurements such as “twenty-five cents’ worth of lean meat” or “two cents’ worth of alum.” The relative scarcity of stores selling bulk dry chemicals to the general public aside, what the hell is the conversion factor for two (1889) cents’ worth of alum? One could get a senior thesis out of that project.
PCs and Liberal?
PCs and NDP?
Liberal and NDP?
BQ and Green?
My rant: The marks on the lid (which acts as a measureing cup) for liquid laundry detergent. The first line from the bottom is often marked 0 (zero). WTF? Zero means nothing. The first of something can’t be the zeroth, dammit!
I’ve stopped buying Haagen Dazs for this reason. I’m not going to reward that shit. Ben & Jerry’s is still in 1 pint containers, and when we buy supermarket ice-cream, we also sometimes buy Talienti or Ciao Bella, which are also still 16 ounces.
I realize that costs go up, and that manufacturers need to raise their prices from time to time, but trying to hide it by keeping the package size the same while reducing the contents really pisses me off.
The Consumerist website calls it the Grocery Shrink Ray, and have dozens of articles, going back quite a few years, on the practice.
I just wonder how far companies are actually willing to go with this. Will the OP’s laundry soap eventually come in a 2-pound container? Will chocolate chips eventually be sold only in 4-oz packs? Will all ice cream buckets eventually be the size of those little individual servings?
My biggest retail pet-peeve is policies that corporate comes up with that annoy both customers and employees, but the corporate folk don’t give a fuck since they don’t have to deal with it in person. They’re just rying to make an extra buck.
My example- Offering a store credit card at the point of purchase.
Every damn store does it, every customer hates being asked, and every employee hates asking. Customers want to be rung up as quick as possible and be on their way and cashiers would probably be happy if they were allowed to do that.
The last thing a cashier wants to do, and the last thing people in line want someone in front of them to do, is start filling out a credit card application bringing the checkout lane to a screeching halt.
This always reminds of the great Whammyburger scene from Falling Down.
Blue Bell Ice Cream still comes in 1/2 gallons. And if you can’t get it in your area (they’re from Texas; it may be a southern thing) I truly weep for you. It is ice cream of the gods.
And now the points expire after 30 days, so if you don’t shop often, or don’t fill up often, you never manage to use the discount. Jerks.
I think that there’s a natural limit somewhere. After all, people still do want to buy ice cream and laundry soap in reasonably useful sizes.
Once everyone has shrunk down to 75% of the former size, there’s at least a little pressure for someone to go back to the full size and label the parts of the package that stick out where the “new normal” packages shrink in as “33% more!” than the “standard” size.
Not sure if mine fits but I’ll throw it in here anyway:
I hate it when you call a business and they force their employees to answer like this:
- [ring, ring]*
Company: "Hello, thank you for calling Stanley Steamer carpet cleaning services. Home of the world’s first green friendly chemicals. We have a wide variety of services, including furniture items for $25 a piece for a limited time only. My measurements are 26-24-26. I sometimes experience anal leakage when I eat too many greasy foods. How may we here at Stanley Steamer help you today?
Me: Um, yeah, I just wanted to confirm my 11 o’clock tomorrow…
And it only cost 40% more than the standard size! What a bargain!
God remember when places started asking for your address and phone number a few years back before they would let you buy anything? You go into Radio Shack to buy batteries and they ask before they would let you pay, I always scoffed and the guy said he had to ask and had to get some answer from me or get fired. I gave him Ano Nymous at 123 Fake Street and he dutifully punched it in.
I HATE when employees try to make me feel pity for them because of their employer’s insane policy.
As the cost of food rises a manufacturer’s options are to either continue providing the same amount and raise your cost, or reduce quantity and maintain the old price. I get that the latter is a little sneaky, but I don’t think there’s some greedy conspiracy happening.
You’re obviously not a programmer. Zero indexing is perfectly intuitive for us propeller-heads. That said, I can’t imagine why laundry detergent companies would want to pander to us in particular.
When they ask “zip code?” or “phone number?” I just smile and cheerily say “no thanks!”
Most of the time they just skip it, or put in the store’s zip code instead.
No small amount at the old price is still an increased cost. If I sell you 4 jelly beans for a dollar (shutup these are good jelly beans) that works out to a 25 cents per jelly bean or a quarter dollar. If I reduce that price to 3 jelly beans per dollar than that’s 33 and 1/3 cents per jelly bean.
In other words jelly beans cost 1/3 more.
Here’s the thing. It’s more than a bit sneaky. What do you call someone who tries to make you believe something that isn’t true?
What are you arguing? That’s exactly what Hero From Sector 7G is saying. There are two ways to raise price:*
(1)Increase price, keep quantity static
(2)Decrease quantity, keep price static
S/he even noted that the second way is sneakier.
*I guess a third would be to increase price and decrease quantity simultaneously.
Ah, but you’re not thinking like a CEO. If the bag of chips that used to be $3 for 2 cups is now $3 for 1 1/2 cups, and my recipe that I’ve been using forever and don’t feel like converting calls for 2 cups of chips (or, for lots and lots of people, have no idea how to convert to a 75% batch)…well, then I’ve got to get two bags! I must spend $6 for 3 cups of chips to have enough for my cookies! The bastards are most certainly making more per transaction, even charging “the same” per bag.
Check out the big bottles of Tide sometime. Same size in liquid ounces. Same size caps with the same markings in the same places. One says it washes 50some loads when the cap/cup is filled to line 2, and the other says it washes 90some loads when the cap/cup is filled to line 2. Same amount of detergent, nearly double the load claims. And no, this isn’t some trick HE or not HE thing. I spent nearly half an hour in Target last week trying to figure out WTF was going on here. Never did figure it out, but I started getting weird looks from the Red Shirts, so I left.
They produce many different concentrations to purposely confuse the consumer.
Why the hell they don’t just give us the (one) most concentrated formula, I don’t know. Oh, wait a minute… I do know.
One brand (and I forget which brand it is) of children’s cough syrup used to call for 1 spoonful of medicine per dose. Then, suddenly, the dosage went up to 2 spoonfuls of medicine per dose. That is, the manufacturer put out a diluted formula, adjusted the dosage recommendation, and kept the price the same.
What really ground my gears was that the manufacturer tried to say that this wasn’t a price increase, that most parents bought a new bottle when their kids got sick, so that the price was essentially the same. Well, that’s not my experience. I bought a new bottle when I started running low on the damn syrup, and if I wasn’t the sort of person that I happen to be, I’d be undermedicating my child. However, I DO read the label on each new bottle to see if there have been dosage changes…and I would have noticed the change. The manufacturer was cutting the number of doses per bottle in half, and expected people to not notice or not care.
I hated that. I was trying to buy batteries and they wanted my address and phone number. I might have been rude, but I told the clerk that I wasn’t giving that info out for a pack of batteries. I then went home and wrote a scathing email to Radio Shack. I don’t know if their policy has changed because I’ve not been in one since then.
Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover’s Soul does that. I used to pay $22.00 for 20 lbs. Now I pay $32.00 for 18 lbs. I tried to move my cats to Wellness when they cost the same per pound, but my rotten beasts refused to eat it.