Instead of just raising the price? Actually, plenty of places do both simultaneously or one after the other. They will raise the price of an item slightly and also reduce portions slightly.
I guess it’s not my place to tell them how to run their business but as a customer I personally prefer to pay more while getting the same product. Skimping on portions or lowering its quality feels like a betrayal to me because you expect something and you get less. Whereas raising the price feels acceptable and honest. I used to frequent an Italian restaurant, when they downgraded the product, I went elsewhere. I would’ve gladly paid more.
If you know about the business, please tell me what you think. I am not questioning the economic wisdom of their decision, they probably know more about the business than I do, I’m just trying to understand.
Restaurants, especially US restaurants, serve obscenely large portions anyway. They’ve crept up over the last few decades, but really the portions are still ridiculously large.
What gets me is this happening in grocery stores. The latest I just noted is that 500g blocks of cheese are now 440g blocks of cheese. So, like a 10% increase. Why not just put the price up by 10%? I fucking hate this shrinkage creep that continues to happen.
I am not sure where you are writing from but portion size in restaurants is not a general problem in the U.S. Lots of people believe the opposite is true including me. The amount of food most restaurants serve is insane compared to the rest of the world and what healthy portion sizes should look like. I don’t think I have ever left a restaurant wanting more and I usually cut things off way before my companions do. Even the freebies like bread or salsa and chips are more than some 3rd Worlder’s eat in a day. I appreciate quality much more than quantity and only judge restaurants based on that.
As to grocery store portions and price … I suspect that market research has demonstrated that consumers are, for many products*, price sensitive more than weight or volume sensitive. You may be different but that is very likely what market research demonstrated hence the sticking to price point more than size point.
*Some not - a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, ground beef by the pound … so on.
A few years ago when I managed a Jack in the Box, we got notified one day that we’d be getting new blades for our tomato slicers, which would produce six slices from each tomato instead of five. According to the studies they’d done in our corporate test kitchen, the change would save $1.1 million a year in food cost system-wide, and taste testers couldn’t tell the difference.
I moved to the US from the UK in 1979, and one of the things that struck me even then was the gargantuan servings of food served here, compared to what I was used to. And as has been mentioned already, serving sizes have quadrupled since then. Restaurant serving are fucking huge - used to be, and still are. Sizes of burgers, fries and drinks (for instance) have risen exponentially in the last couple of decades.
People notice if the price of something they buy regularly goes up by a little bit. They’re less likely to notice if the portion shrinks by a little bit.
I suppose, but obviously people do notice: me for example.
What gets me is that they need to retool their production lines, along with whatever inspection and test procedures support this, and also all packaging material and literature,
Just put the damned price up by 10%. I understand that better. Really.
This gets to me too, but mostly because of recipes written in terms of the long-established common sizes. For instance, I’ve got a recipe that calls for a 14.5 oz. can of stewed tomatoes, because stewed tomatoes have come in 14.5 oz. cans for the last 50 years, but now the common size can has become 13.3 oz. So do I buy the 28 oz. can, and measure out 14.5 oz, or omit 1.2 oz. of what the recipe calls for? And if I do the former, I’ve now got leftover stewed tomatoes to use up.
And what really kills me is that, yes, I know leaving out the 1.2 oz. of tomatoes, or whatever, isn’t really going to alter the recipe significantly in most cases. But it’s still irksome.
(For the record, I made up this example. As far as I know, 14.5 oz cans of stewed tomatoes remain available. But this sort of thing has become common, even if canned tomatoes remain unaffected.)
That said, I just want to point out that the graph in the first link is extremely misleading.
By trying to illustrate how an object increases 4 times in size by drawing it 4 times as tall, they are actually making something that looks 64 times as big.
I just sketched up a few 3D cylinders in CAD to see what that difference in volume really looks like. I scaled up an approximation of a soda can and scaled down my estimate of a current big burger by the appropriate amounts to get a rough idea of old vs current portions.
The visual difference is large, as expected, but not nearly as dramatic as that graph incorrectly implies. It’s basically the difference between the largest typical (pick any brand) fast food drink and the smallest drink paired with a large double cheese burger vs. something off the dollar/value menu.
I’m of the opinion that the point of that graph would have been better conveyed with a more realistic depiction. Heck - why not just show the increase in portion sizes by using pictures of actual food of the type I mentioned above, including of course an order of the largest/smallest fries?
It is telling however that you had to make up the example. I am our household’s cook and I cannot think of a time that has happened. The items that are used like that fall into the “size sensitive” more than “price sensitive” group and don’t get changed in that way, for exactly that reason. Butter keeps being sold in 4 oz sticks.
Can production also is harder and more expensive to change so canned goods tend to stay consistent; wrapping up a block of cheese or how much weight of cereal is in a box and how much is air … cheap to implement.
Kyrie’s example of the tomatoes may be made up, but I can offer a real-world equivalent. My grandmother’s cavatini recipe, which I dearly love, calls for 32 oz of spaghetti sauce. How often do you see those any more? Using just 24 oz, in this case, completely ruins the recipe: It comes out far too dry. I can buy the one brand in the store that still comes in a 32 oz can, which is far more expensive than the others, or I can buy two 24 oz jars and then try to find something else to use the remainder for before it goes bad (keeping in mind that I’m going to be having leftover pasta for at least a week anyway). The solution I eventually found is to use the “remainder” in the week before I make the cavatini.
And the worst example of grocery-store downsizing I ever saw was with vinegar. I’m looking at two containers of white vinegar. They’re both one gallon (and it’s an actual gallon in both cases), and for white vinegar, it’s not like I care about quality, since I’m just using it for cleaning anyway. So I should buy the one that’s cheaper, right? Wrong. The cheaper one is only 4% acidity, instead of the standard 5%, and it’s not 20% cheaper. And vinegar is the sort of thing where having the wrong strength could seriously screw up a recipe.