They’re making Eggos thinner. I had to change the toaster settings.
Wow, bumping my own thread! Anyway, I just heard that Lay’s is planning to lower the prices on some of their salty-snack products, likely to spur more sales on Superb Owl weekend.
I also suspect that there may be a shrinkflation component to it.
Seems illogical. On special holidays people will buy what they want for their parties and ignore the expense.
It’s ordinary days where folks scrimp. So they can afford to celebrate.
So I totally believe there’ll be shrinkflation. But I disbelieve discounts as such.
Since we’ve been bumped, here’s a Feb. 1 gift link on Nestle’s new CEO, who is in “turnaround mode” apparently. (Whew – I was so worried about them.) Anyway, the guy says this, uncommented on by the interviewer:
But then you see on the other side a consumer that obviously is more stretched. They struggle to make ends meet. There, we have to adapt the portfolio.
In the U.S., in the past you would have products in a multipack, because per kilo it might be more economical. Now, you have to adapt how many servings you have in a pack to make sure it fits budgets.
IOW: you keep the price similar but downsize the package. I’d say you also then hope that no one notices, except he’s telling the NYT about it.
Maybe.
Multipack is about e.g. a dozen individual bags of chips in a larger bag or box for, let’s say $12. Repackaging the multipack into 6 bags for $6, with no change is the amount per bag will increase sales from the people who can swing $6 at a time, but not $12. They still eat the same amount of chips per year, but they buy it in smaller increments more frequently. Because of their cashflow problems.
This is very standard merchandising in very poor countries. In India they sell washing machine powder in packages that only have enough soap for one load of clothes. Because nobody could scrape together enough money at one time to buy a 5-load, much less a US-typical 50-load package of soap powder.
The message is a lot of Americans are getting very, very hand to mouth.
Now you’re certainly right to suspect they might slip some shrinkflation in there too. IOW, in addition to reducing the multipack from 12 to 6, also reduce each bags price by e.g. 5% but the quantity by e.g. 7%.
But that isn’t what the CEO was actually saying. Of course they’re under no obligation to tell any truth, much less the whole truth.
You are right, of course.
The worst shrinkflation I’ve seen was on a gallon jug of white vinegar. Normally, vinegar is sold at 5% acidity, but this jug (which was cheaper than the one of the other brand next to it) was only at 4% acidity. Which means that, if that’s what you actually wanted, it’d actually be cheaper to buy the “more expensive” one and water it down.
But it’s worse than that, because 4% acidity probably isn’t what you want, and a home kitchen doesn’t have the means to un-dilute it back to the proper strength. And a lot of recipes are going to depend on that proper strength, and might even be dangerous with the diluted stuff.
I’ve heard about this. 4% acetic acid is fine for salad dressings, cleaning scale off faucets, etc. but if you’re canning or making pickles, you really need the 5% formula for proper food preservation.
As for Nestle’, they’re such a conglomerate that it’s almost impossible to totally avoid them, but I think many, if not most, of us know about the disasters they have caused in developing countries, due to their aggressive marketing of baby formula.
Dollar General has sample packs of various things available for $1 or other smaller amounts of money. One of those items is prepackaged salt and pepper shakers, and I like to pick a few of them up occasionally for the food pantry.
“Monetary inflation is what happens when a currency is untethered to anything.”
^This is very true, imo. The really scary part of today’s prices to me is not so much the prices themselves, but the cause which is the dollar simply losing its value at an incredible pace. The reality is a dollar today is simply worth far less than it was in even recent years, so suddenly everything seems to cost too much. Not sure how its all gonna play out but I’m not encouraged by what our ‘leaders’ have been doing.
One of my breakfast staples is frozen hash brown patties roasted in the oven. Kroger used to sell them in cardboard sleeves of a dozen, covered with transparent wrap. Then they switched to selling them in opaque bags with the notation that you’d be getting “approximately” the same number of patties. If I was a diligent consumer I’d count them each time I opened a new bag to see how many they were shorting me this time. They can’t have saved anything on the packaging, so it was a blatant example of selling less for the same or inflated prices.
I don’t see where you said you were actually getting less. Was the package weight different? Did you ever count the number of patties?
Surely the note on the new packaging advising that quantities would vary, just meant that customers were equally likely to get more patties compared to less. Businesses often err on the side of giving people more than they paid for. 
So you don’t know whether the package weights varied or price per ounce or anything?
I was going to buy the hash brown patties regardless, so no.
Sorry if I seemed mean to Kroger, which surely had the best intentions.