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Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I track over the years is the price of a regular sized candy bar at the grocery store checkout. When I was a kid in the 70’s and 80’s, they were $0.25, and now they are $1.25 or more.

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That's plain inflation: $0.25 in 1975 would be $1.20 today

And yet to a kid wanting a candy bar, it's measurably worse. In the 1980's you would occasionally find a quarter on the ground. Today you never find a dollar on the ground, or even quarters.

I also suspect the quality has dropped. It may just be because I'm not too big on sweets, or my palate becoming dull with age, but when I had a bit of Halloween candy recently it all tasted like wax and sugar. Even things that were favorites when I was a kid (Butterfingers and Whoppers in particular) were bland and flavorless compared to what I remembered.

The "fun sized" versions of candy generally given out at Halloween always tasted stale to me, likely due to the production and distribution methods for the holiday. I wouldn't use those to draw conclusions.

More likely they were actually stale, lots of people buy a big stash of candy and hand it out over several years until it runs out.

They were stale, but even freshly purchased ones are often stale. Candy goes stale faster than you'd think, and seasonal candy often sits around longer and is stored with less care than a regular candy bar.

nobody does this. Keeps halloween candy between years? why? there's no advantage to having a "big stash". halloween candy decomposes into empty wrappers naturally anyways. It has a half life of 9 days.

After Halloween specials on candy are amazing. Theoretically, people could just always buy those deals and save them for the next year. That holds for all after season items.

This is a perfect strategy for buying clothes, but candies? nobody stores candies this long :)

If you were buying winter tires sure but Halloween candy is on sale every year and the cost for most homes is negligible so it's unlikely people are stockpiling it

There’s no advantage to a big stash, but it’s easy to overestimate the number of trick-or-treaters, have a ton of candy left on your hands, and just stick it in the closet for next year.

No it's not

They probably are a little more stale than the large bars because many are in the unsealed paper wrappers.

I swear Twix used to be much better. I haven't been meticulously tracking it over the years or anything, but there is a simple logic that if you can cut costs by making something worse, and there's pretty much no higher-quality alternative, it'll probably still sell.

The quality has definitely dropped.

There have been discrete points where I would buy a Reese's peanut butter cup and go "Yuck!". We're currently in such a phase right now where I won't buy them anymore.

I really notice when they tamper with the peanut butter. But there have been a couple of times where they over-sugared the chocolate.

Normally, I would have blown it off as "getting old" except that I mentioned that I wouldn't buy one anymore and two children (14 and 10) agreed that they started sucking that year.

Yeah, peanuts really show the quality difference. Half of the fun size Snickers I’ve gotten the past few years have tasted straight up rancid.

The only one that's as good as I remember from childhood is Kinder eggs. That chocolate is amazing and waaaay better than we deserved as kids. Still get one for xmas every year although could do without the plastic toy.

Funnily enough I've always thought Kinder chocolate was way too sweet (even as a kid) and I remember being flummoxed by the tagline of Kinder ads (in Italy, but that's where they're from), which was "more milk, less cocoa". Kid me was thinking: "wait! Isn't milk way cheaper than and less delicious than cocoa?". But then again it was probably aimed at health conscious parents...

Is cocoa bad for you? It’s the milk and the sugar that are unhealthy, as far as I know.

Cocoa is pretty fat and (at least in Italy) there is a popular belief that it might cause acne.

I think it's also interesting to note that Nutella (also from Ferrero) has a history of being a post-WW2 pure chocolate substitute at a time when hazelnuts were much cheaper and easier to source. It seems to be in the company's DNA to produce chocolate-based confections while touting chocolate as the bad guy.

Cocoa powder is just fat and carbs with basically no other nutritional content but it's not really any worse for you than other sources of the same thing.

The milk is probably the most nutritionally rich thing in your average chocolate bar.

Kinder eggs are European chocolate, aren't they? European chocolate is much higher quality than the American counterpart, so maybe that would explain?

There isn't a European counterpart to American milk chocolate (which mostly tastes like Hershey's) is there? Like, the reason they are different isn't quality, it's that they are different.

Or have you sampled American chocolates that do not try to follow Hershey's flavor and found that they are all inferior?

AFAIK, In Europe the minimum cocoa content for chocolate is 20% while 10% in the US. The US mainstream chocolate handles the lacking cocoa by adding more sugar. Of course you'll find all kinds of boutique chocolates everywhere, but the earlier anecdotes seemed to be about the cheap mainstream stuff.

That's probably just your taste buds dulling with age, I have the same experience, many things I couldn't get enough of as kid now tastes bland (and not just prepackaged food. It's particularly noticable with sweets.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/05/526750174/wh...

Has the weight remained the same?

Nope - in fact, I hear that they prefer to change the size rather than the price because consumers tend not to notice it as much.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/25401945

That's basically matched to inflation - would be more surprised if unchanged

I have heard that too, but I don't believe in it. If they do it, it must be applied only in specific circumstances, and with some other mechanism to restore the size again. Because containers aren't getting silly small over time. They seem to be pretty much aimed at whatever is a convenient amount.

Coffee is sometimes that way. For more expensive beans brands’ll cut the weight and keep the price the same, shelve it right next to the other stuff. You have to check the weight to see which ones are expensive.

[edit] and of course 12oz has replaced 16oz as the “standard” size.

The UK mandates putting 'price per unit' on the price labels, which makes this kind of comparison a lot easier.

Some stores in the US have that, some don’t, and it’s always a lot smaller than the total price when they do.

I've come to really enjoy grocery shopping, planning a week worth of meals, being adaptive when good deals come up, trying new things, working to minimize waste. Eating a healthy diet.

One of the things I like about grocery shopping is practicing mental math, and I calculate price per quantity mentally when choosing between different brands/sizes. It's good mental exercise, and the ability to do that sort of division mentally occasionally is helpful in other contexts.

A lot of them that do mix units between products of the same class (one measured as volume per unit, and another as mass per unit), making it difficult to do a direct comparison.

What do you mean by "it's smaller than the total"? Do they literally write the wrong price or do they choose any unit they happen to think makes for a good sounding price per unit?

In most of Europe (probably all the EU countries at least, unified regulations yay) shops need to put the price per 1kg/100g/1L/100mL on the tags, depending on which is most appropriate for the product.

The physical printing is smaller.

Often much smaller. A few stores like Costco actually print it large enough that you don't have to get up close and squint at each price tag to see the unit price. Usually you can't just scan the shelf and comparison shop on unit price.

Same in Canada. Unit prices are useful for comparisons, but it's hard to avoid the big, colorful "ON SALE" tags.

This absolutely happens. But after a while, manufacturers increase the size & price at the same time, pointing out the increase in product, of course. None of this is new, it's been happening for decades.

It's a documented phenomenon that happens so regularly there's a name for it: shrinkflation.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/24/sweets-are-...

Specifically, Hershey's Chocolate Bars did it to maintain a 5 cent price from 1902 until 1969. By then, the bar shrank to half the size as it used to be, so they doubled the size of the bar and charged 10 cents for it.

Coke was also a nickel for a long time, and since it was frequently sold in vending machines it was advantageous to be able to sell it for a single coin. So they actually lobbied for the production of a 7.5 cent coin.

This is what happened in Ireland when new taxes on sugary drinks came in. Drinks that came in 2L bottles now came in 1.75L bottles at the same price. The diet versions with no sugar remained in 2L bottles. Companies like Coke are now only making variants like vanilla or cherry flavours using their diet or zero sugar products

This is why if you want to tax sweet drinks, you should charge it on artificial sweeteners too because otherwise it’s just a handout for aspartame.

...but that’s the idea. They want people to drink the artificially sweetened version instead. That’s what the tax is for. If they taxed both the same it wouldn’t work.

I think you've missed sight of the point of those taxes, which is to reduce consumption of actual excess sugar, not to tax things that taste sweet.

Both are unhealthy its not clear that fake sweeteners are better for you. Why tax a different kind of unhealthy less?

I'm no fan of artificial sweeteners or sweet things in general but the scientific evidence is pretty overwhelming that most of them are far healthier than sugar.

Non-sugar sweeteners are better for you in at least one significant way: they have almost zero calories.

Because the scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that artificial sweeteners _are_ better for you. They have no proven health impact and eliminate calories. The idea that they're somehow "just as bad" (or even worse) only comes from sugar and corn industry lobbying and marketing efforts.

Yep. Same thing happened with baked beans and corn chips recently. Shrink the size while offering a small discount (still more expensive per unit weight) and then a little later introduce a new jumbo size for more than the old price.

The one for me was breyer's ice cream. I was working stocking it at the time it happened. They used to show up as 5 packs of 500g cartons. One summer, during a sale, the prices stayed the same, but they started showing up in 4 packs of 450g cartons. I had to rearrange the whole shelf because they didn't fit the same way any more. So this really stuck in my mind. The cost was the same to the store too on the packing slips for a whole pallet. They just gave less and decreased the size of each carton.

I've told a related story from the same time period on here before about how they stopped putting handles on the large 4L ice cream buckets so they could save 1¢ per bucket. That was the same summer.

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