Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/06/26/europes-inf...
The real answer is that when inflation is happening, it provides an easy excuse for raising prices far beyond the cost of your inputs. Everyone expects prices to go up, so they don't balk at yours going up faster than inflation.
It's one of those simple macro-econ models that sound good, but never play out in real life because humans aren't calculators. The reality is a mix of both, probably more of your explanation.
Critically higher profit margins doesn’t necessarily translate to higher profits because you’re selling fewer goods.
Remember, prices generally are a function of the cost the market will bear. If the general public will pay more for something, why not rise the price? If everyone is rising their prices at the same time, you have less pressure to compete on prices.
Optimum Y is not related to X, but the price when you replace the stock. ( let's say X2 ) When supply has problems, or economy is unpredictable, it is harder to predict X2, so usually your estimation is a bit off.
So you have to have bigger margin to cover for this estimation error. ( assume the worst )
(Yes, equilibrium economics is a joke even when law of big numbers is involved.)
For example, if there's a natural disaster, and the people in power aren't dumb, they'll let prices float instead of putting caps in place, and everyone will be incentivised to rent big trucks full of water bottles and sell it for 20-50x the normal price. For the affected people it makes sense because now they can drink water, and if the prices were controlled nobody would make the drive. Eventually enough people do the drive or the disaster passes and prices normalize.
At the moment it's hard to explain what is happening but it might be more complex than just "nothing to see here". I've come to realize that reality is more nuanced than Milton Friedman made it out to be (and he did too later in life).
It’s possible your point does apply to normal price shifts when supply for something like electronics becomes constrained but right now your example detracts from understanding that.
Some are smart psycopaths. The issue isn't dumb in power but dumb people voting. People get outraged by price gouging so populists create laws against it. Even though those laws don't make economic sense they make political sense.
Most of the time IMO state agents will just ignore price gouging because they know it is a necessary evil but if the need arises they can always intervene in prices, say they are doing something and save face. But this destroys the economy if done often. It's not black and white.
What does not make sense is a world where people have to buy disaster issuance just to make sure they can afford water when a hurricane strikes.
I think most states that experience natural disasters have price gouging laws that make it illegal to raise prices, during a declared emergency, beyond the level required by increased costs.
Or at least I know Louisiana[1] and California[2] do.
And here in Louisiana we've had a lot of disasters and it generally works (sometimes gouging still happens).
[1] https://legis.la.gov/legis/Law.aspx?d=85680
[2] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
In my opinion, disasters that have some level of predictability (hurricanes are the best example) shouldn't have price gouging laws. If you were allowed to raise your prices arbitrarily high, and you knew a hurricane was coming, what would you do? Bring in as many of the goods as you thought you could get higher prices for as you could. This results in an equilibrium where lots more water, food, batteries, etc. gets brought in, prices rise only somewhat, and no law is necessary.
Now, I agree that for disasters that aren't forseeable (like earthquakes), you lose the signalling value, so I'm more amenable to it.
Sure, some shelves might be bare the day before the storm but that doesn't mean people aren't prepared, that they aren't able to get the things they need, or that the current method does not work.
And when the power is out for a week+ for a whole region (goes beyond the supplies urban locals typically prepare) then government uses the national guard to hand out MREs and/or bottled water in commercial parking lots. This is very rare.
I remember a study on New York following Hurricane Sandy. Fuel was out. Drugs were supplied. Because nobody was incentivised to bring in extra fuel before the hurricane hit; there was no margin to incentivise it. But there was an incentive to bring in drugs, because dealers could make a killing selling at a premium.
Price-gouging laws are the price of keeping the peace with a population illiterate in basic economics. (And in any case, there is always a black market in play.)
Sometimes they have backup power or power companies prioritize them. In the south, local media will help notify which gas stations are operable. More fuel won't solve that problem.
For Sandy they had more issues than just pumps without power. 40% of their supply was reduced before the storm even hit from shutting down refineries. And then the refineries suffered damage. Storage tanks were damaged. Pipelines were inoperative. They couldn't fill delivery trucks. [1][2]
For a typical hurricane, why would there even need to be extra fuel over normal supply? In a hurricane people are driving less. They're staying home. The only extra fuel will be from generators and hoarders.
Price increases would probably decrease hoarders but it wouldn't turn refineries back on and magically make more gas.
[1] https://www.preventionweb.net/english/hyogo/gar/2015/en/bgdo... [pdf][page 6]
[2] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/sandy-storm-anniversar...
They’re a gas station. They’re sitting on a fuel source. Why do you think it isn’t economical to install a generator? (Or even lease one.)
> why would there even need to be extra fuel over normal supply
Emergency vehicles. Trucks bringing supplies for repairs. People checking in on each other. People coming back from evacuation or leaving to find peace of mind. Also returning to normal life.
And it’s not about extra fuel. It’s about maintaining supplies. New shipments aren’t coming in, which means supplies need to be rationed. New shipments come in slower than they would if prices could rise; nobody serving the general population is incentivised to rush.
> increases would probably decrease hoarders but it wouldn't turn refineries back on and magically make more gas
Emergency shortages are all about distribution, not production. There is plenty of gas in the world in a disaster. It just isn’t making it to disaster victims. (Well, it is. But you have the pay the cab driver cash to pay the guy by Riverside Park for a can at $20/gallon.)
Sounds good, I'd pay tax money toward it.
There were widespread fuel shortages.
> regulations in place to stop people taking advantage of vulnerable people
There were no fuel shortages for folks who could buy on the black market.
> Sounds good
In a sense, the system works. The part of the population that feels good with these rules sits out of the market. The part that thinks it’s silly has access, in part thanks to the shortages/forced curtailment caused by regulation in the legal market, albeit at a steeper mark-up (plus the inherent risks to black market trading).
They have no incentive to do so. If they were actual human beings with functioning consciences maybe, but we often see people use the word "smart" to mean "ruthless asshole without a functioning moral compass". Those people assume everyone else would torture their own grandmother for an extra dollar just like they would, and so everyone who's not abusing the system to its fullest extent is just dumber than them. So in fact the people who are likely to be in power, who have absolutely no incentive to protect their constituents, will likely be in on the con as much as they can, and will actually call themselves "smart" for doing so.
Thankfully not everyone behaves like an economics textbook.
Only the rich people. It does nothing for everyone else.
Shouldn't it be humanity that takes offense in a natural disaster instead of financial exploitation?
Parent's comment was (implicitly) about 50% of this inflation being avoidable and thus surprising, because margins didn't necessarily have to go up to keep business going. It was just a seized opportunity. If you can show that margins unavoidably always go up during inflation because of some fundamental mechanism, then that would be a refutal of the parent argument.
I'm not sure anybody fully understands the mechanism (for the most studied phenomenon of economics, inflation is quite badly understood), but that doesn't change the fact.
Anyway, if you run the Keynes model for macroeconomics, the average margin increases very naturally when the money supply increases. It increases even more if the new money is injected in the economy by well distributed government spending. Still, that's one model we have that kinda works, but it's so full of problems that you can't take its predictions for granted.
> consumer goods companies are not cooperating in efforts to cut the price of thousands of staples despite a fall in the cost of raw materials.
From the article you linked: "Profits (adjusted for inflation) were about 1 percent above their pre-pandemic level in the first quarter of this year."
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CA.PA/financials?p=CA.PA
Isn't this exactly why we should buy into this narrative? The manufacturers increased their margins, so Carrefour sells more expensive, but in the end gets the same total profit.
Smart businesses don't wait until they start losing money to make adjustments. They plan ahead. These "margin increases" are literally increases due to inflation which will companies expect to take hold over the next 1-2 years. There could be a variety of factors for this. One such example is corporate bonds rolling over to new interest rates which are expected to start happening en masse very soon.
This might be a really, really stupid question, but aren't corporate decisions sort of the economy?
I'll buy the media narrative this time, thank you.
Meanwhile, they've both reported their highest ever company profits. :(
So, clearly they're full of shit about the cost of goods being the cause rather than their own price gouging.
If the value of the Australian dollar halves, then a company doubling it's raw profit figures is really just staying maintaining the same profits in real value.
Why would their "maintaining the same profits in real value" be acceptable when no-one else in the end to end chain (producers, customers, etc) managed to in the situation.
Again, if the value of currency halves and profits in raw curry terms doubles then profit in terms of real value has remained the same. If a company pays it's employees $30 and the value of currency halves, and it raises wages to $45 did they really raise wages? In raw terms, yes, but in real terms no. The value of wages has actually gone down.
The problem in Austrialia is a lack of competition, hence Woolworths can get a 5.9% profit compared with say Tesco in the UK with 3.8% profit (the UK having far more competition)
Not only that but while demand is decreasing, profits are increasing. That's a ridiculous system and shows a broken market.
Too few people spread too far apart.
Explain ALDI?
Smart.
In terms of labor and wages, it's called a wage price spiral: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage-price_spiral
Similar dynamics exist for physical goods.
>Do not buy into that narrative.
Would you mind sharing the data? I've done a quick search, but I can't confirm what you said.
I found this, which contradicts what you said, but Statista is not super reliable: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116200/australia-net-pr...
But even if it's true, and they recorded the largest profits, the catalyst still is the monetary policy. If businesses could just price gauge their clients, they would have already done it before. The goal of a corporation has always been to maximize utility, and this hasn't suddenly changed; so ask yourself, why are they raising prices now.
You can't think of any major global event that happened since 2020 that may work as a "distraction" and a cover while businesses engage in monopolistic/anti-competitive behavior?
There are obvious financial cost increases that have happened which are falsely represented as 'profit' in this analysis.
Worse, is it’s never been easier to collude. It used to be you had to pay a big consulting firm big money for them to tell you “current market rates” for many goods and services. Now you can just subscribe to same SaaS everyone in your industry uses and have it tell you how much to charge. This tends to help break out of a prisoner’s dilemma.
This was something I never quite anticipated. I used the intenet when it was young to help do price discovery and find better deals. Never occurred to me the end game was for companies to do it even better for pricing. Even after seeing thrift store pricing adjust due to seeing online prices on ebay, it didn’t occur to me the scale it would happen elsewhere.
There is no collusion here and this has jack shit to do with mergers. If those were the causes, inflation would have been a crisis 10 years ago.
Everyone raises prices to increase profits, increasing inflation, that increases prices further...
I don't understand why people are so happy to blame governments and treat companies, in which profit is their raison d'être, as if they're only "reacting to the government".
Of course both are to blame, but let's stop pretending companies are victims while record profits are seen everywhere (adjusted to inflation). Many (if not most) are clearly taking advantage of this exact sentiment against the government to pocket even more profit. It's not me, it's the inflation!
I don't see how the frequency changes my assertion though. That's the regular boom/bust cycle from capitalism. There are many theories on why that happens but the fact is: they happen.
I hope this time it will be corrected... permanently.
This is a very shallow look at economic forces. And ignores some of the bigger squeezes happening. The number of landlords continues to decline as real estate is consolidated in fewer hands. And worse, the number of landlords that abdicate their roles to real estate management companies grows every year, and the percentage of properties in an area run by a given management company continues to grow as well. This creates a level of “collusion” that didn’t really exist 30 years ago.
Our current market abhors competition, and regulators and courts have increasingly sided with the bigger business.
Inflation was a huge problem 10 years ago. It’s why I stopped renting.
Roughly half. Nearly all of the locally owned ones.
>Inflation was a huge problem 10 years ago. It’s why I stopped renting.
No it wasn’t. At least not by any quantitative measures.
So, the inflation story is most certainly a lie. The businesses started to charge more because they had an excuse in (a minor) supply shock and fuel price rises. But it's just that, an excuse. Worst case pure inflation is about 10% while the increases are... a lot. Especially in some sectors.
The situation is "so bad" for some corporations they're instituting stock buybacks. :) So stockholders are getting rich.
This is not some corporate conspiracy. The fed’s comments on inflation have made it very clear there is a labor shortage in the services sector that is driving up costs there quickly.
Starting hourly rates at these restaurants are now $20/hr, up from $15 a couple of years ago, and that’s still not enough. Each one of them has hiring signs and is clearly short staffed.
Sure there is inflation, but maybe those companies keep sending excel files to each-others department and keep increasing prices multiple times more than needed.
See also: 9/11 and various civil liberties.
Unless you're in a highly regulated sector like energy or healthcare, in most countries you don't need an excuse to hike prices.
Again, the "prices are higher cuz corporate greed" logic fails to account the basic fact that companies are always profit maximizing and no relevant legislation related to corporate profits was passed in most countries. If they can increase prices without losing customers, they will.
So, again, what has changed? Search for the balance sheet of your local central bank and you will have an answer.
The grocery store can legally double the price of bread absent any good reason, but people will flip out.
They didn’t flip out when that exact thing happened during the pandemic, because “it’s the supply chain” made enough sense to people they accepted it.
The pandemic gave them a new way to “increase prices without losing customers” for a while.
For example, in 2020 there was a huge increase in demand for used cars, and the price of used cars increased by ~40% within a few months. But people who sold used cars did not have their costs increase - they were, after all, selling an already completed product. The IMF would therefore estimate that between 2019 and 2020, ~100% of inflation in used car prices was due to margin increases rather than inflation itself.
This is obviously silly - the increase in prices was because there were too many buyers and too few cars, not because the owners of used cars suddenly because significantly more greedy overnight. It's the same with corporate profits. Inflation has distributional effects which are interesting to study, but we shouldn't confuse ourselves by claiming that the effects are actually the causes.
If I know this, I suspect the IMF does too, and incorporated that into the report.
You’re comparing the concept of economy-wide inflation with the basic supply-demand economics for one item.
LMAO no. It's foolish to equate an individual selling a single asset like a car with businesses that can range from little niche supply workshops up to dominating whole industries. Pure laws of supply and demand only hold true under conditions of perfect competition, and much of what we call 'business' is about playing the meta-game - out maneuvering competitors financially, creating moats and other barriers to entry to keep competitors out of a market sector, using marketing to maximize product differentiation and shape consumer perception, leveraging regulatory complexity in one's favor or lobbying for it to be reduced in order to gain some cost advantage.
Real world markets are a lot more complex than the little toy ones used to explain fundamental economic concepts.
I demonstrated this with an example, where we know what caused a price change (supply chain issues for a substitute product plus increased demand) and know the distributional effect (higher margins for sellers of used cars). If we naively try to explain the price change based on the distributional effect, we would claim that higher prices were purely caused by increased greed. We know this to be false.
Look, perhaps companies really did become more greedy in 2020 and that's what has really caused inflation. Or maybe large amounts of stimulus caused increased demand. Or perhaps the war in Ukraine has caused supply chain issues which drives up prices. My point is that looking at the distributional effects of inflation is just completely disconnected from the question of what caused inflation in the first place.
At the very least, if you're claiming that we can figure out what caused inflation by looking at the distributional effects, can you provide some evidence, or some argument, to support that claim? Because I think my example demonstrates that common sense ("X benefitted from inflation, therefore X caused inflation") is not a good guide here, and if anything, the additional complexity of real markets works against you here - if we can't even explain inflation based on distributional effects in a toy market, what makes you so confident we can do so in the market as a whole?
But for many consumer goods, manufacturers have exploited the perception of inflation to increase prices or (as highlighted in the source article) to shrink package volumes while retaining the same price point. It's much less clear that supply is the driver here; bear in mind the fact that moving to smaller package sizes often imposes considerable overhead as whole production lines need to be retooled, new package containers designed and manufactured etc. It's not a passive response to market phenomena, it's a straightforward investment in the idea of giving consumers less value for their money.
While I don't disagree that government policy and economic shocks can often be inflationary without any intention on the part of the business community to drive prices up, consider too that sometimes there is such intent and organizations like the Chamber of Commerce exist largely to beg for support from the public purse in hard times and deflect criticism onto whatever scapegoats are convenient in good times.
No it’s literally greed. You can choose to not raise the price of your used car when you sell it. “Market price” is a hallucination that you can ignore. You’re not forced to go along with it. As you said, sellers of used cars didn’t have their cost increase, so what was the forcing function for price increases except greed?
Which brings me to corporate profits…
It's a powerful signal containing important information! You don't have to go along with it, but it may be beneficial to others if you do.
As an example, we bought a new car in 2019. We were planning to sell our old car but every time we were about to sell it, it came in handy - family came to town and we needed two cars, or it was nice to be able to go two places at once.
In 2020, prices shot up. Suddenly, it was worth it to sell the car.
Someone who valued it more than us got to use the vehicle. Was that greed?
You sold it because you could get more money for it. That’s what greed is - you chose more money. You could make the case that you weren’t behaving immorally -not everything in life has to be a charity- but you acted out of a selfish desire for more money.
I’d also argue that “value it more” is pretty flimsy. Yes in a shortage the buyer clearly needed a car and was willing to spend more to acquire it instead of waiting for prices to drop. But you clearly didn’t value it beyond the 2019 price based on your stated desire to sell then, it was just an inconvenient transaction.
If "following market price signals to decide what to produce and sell" is greed, then EVERYTHING is greed.
You make clothes on Etsy, and suddenly people will pay more for silver clothes because Beyonce tells her fans to wear silver. So you make more silver clothes, and sell them for more money to more happy buyers… greedy you!
You have a shelf full of books. One of them is signed by a famous author. It's cool to have it as a conversation piece. That author dies, and suddenly the book is worth enough to pay for some needed home repairs. So you sell it… greedy you!
Didn't they? Increased demand for used cars should mean that used car buyers are forced to pay more for the same car than they would previously. Maybe it's lagging by a bit, but I would absolutely expect that their costs would go up.
Is this just constant margins being spun as conspiracy?
Say I have a 10% margin on a $100 product. Costs rise 10%, i.e. to $99. If I want to keep a 10% margin, I raise prices to $110. How much of that price rise was inflation versus margin increase? Will someone now claim that 90% of cost rises were due to inflation and 10% margin? (Keep in mind, too, that inflation is forward looking.)
Put another way, how enviable have manufacturers’ margins in Argentina, Turkey or Zimbabwe been?
There’s too little goods being produced for too much people having money. Therefore the people selling goods can raise prices.
For some reason people assume that workers can’t be left worse off with inflation bc they assume wages have to increase to follow it. It doesn’t have to be the case. In Europe, workers are becoming poorer.
In the UK many people rely on Food banks and parents skip meals to feed their children. Cutting the amount of food in a package in a manner that is not even visible without carefully examination is a morally dubious practice.
Corporate profits are high. This is one of the reasons why.
You will literally have 3 packages of soda all of the same size listing the price per unit in completely different units. Some in ml, some in oz, some in pts.
Kroger doesn't publish unit prices on their websites, but they do publish quantities. They'll sometimes mix the units up (L, floz, see mapUnit() https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/429539-unit-prices-on-krog...), but generally they're OK.
The script will normalize everything to a specific metric unit & present a unit price on the page.
Why stores have this horrible setup? Probably weaponized incompetence. Would be nice to have the FTC step in with some regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_(unit)
Maybe we'll be going back to hogsheads (or more likely a rundlet) though:
Also, at least in the US, the price/weight for the same type of item is often in different units. ($/oz for brand A; $/lb for brand B, etc)
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...
Even still, this is not a reasonable approach to tracking shrinkflation because I know I don't keep a running log of prices from week to week. I do sometimes notice package shrinking, but only because I buy weekly. If I wad a bulk buyer I'm not sure I'd notice as fast
These things should really be standardized.
Fatty or very sugary liquid products (e.g. cream, syrup) are the only things that can't easily be compared to kg price. I've only seen those advertised by volume, so they can still be compared to their peers.
> Uniform Unit Pricing Regulations apply only when stores voluntarily provide unit pricing information. The unit of measure chosen must be consistent across like items within the category.
So if a store offers unit pricing it must be consistent within a category.
https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laws-and-regulations/us-retail-...
Too bad there's not an obvious way to report violations.
But that was not my point, the price per unit is to compare similar products with each other in the span of a minute or so.
Because if they are ALL going up (or down), then there are clearly external factors to that price change. At worst it's the fault of the supermarket (and here remembering the rough price/unit comes handy, for comparisons in others), or an issue with a monopoly/cartel collusion, in which case hopefully consumer associations are going to start whistleblowing, leading to government handing out punishments.
> In the UK many people rely on Food banks and parents skip meals to feed their children.
A small minority, not 'many'...
Also, using a food bank at least once and 'relying' on them are not the same thing.
"2.1 million people in the UK lived in household which had used a food bank in the previous 12 months, a rate of 3%. This includes 6% of children, 3% of working-age adults, and around 0% of pensioners."
6% of children feels not great, though other stats say the US is much worse, with 6+% of all households, not just children...and I've seen higher estimates.
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
My point was that writing 'many' suggests something common and widespread like if there were breadlines everywhere. It is not (but The Guardian likes to dramatise on this).
In fact, I suspect that poorer people in the UK have a much higher chance of being obese than of being actually hungry.
Inflation increases profits, too (but not in real dollars).
> This is one of the reasons why.
The reason why is inflation.
[Citation needed]
I find it hard to believe that corporate profits rise exactly proportional or less than the inflation rate.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CA.PA/financials?p=CA.PA
Not much of a difference. Certainly nothing that looks outright malicious.
Or as companies like to call it 'not leaving money on the table'.
Prices have outpaced inflation. Everything has, except worker pay and minimum wage.
Profits are record-breaking while laying off workers. CEO compensation and bonuses are insane. Housing prices are out of control. Gas is still $5/gallon where I'm at.
It all boils down to one word: GREED.
Also in the US, the lowest 10% of real wages has grown significantly since 2020, lowering income inequality vs the middle class.
In states like Texas minimum wage is still $7.25/hr and many places pay just that.
How do you reconcile your numbers with that?
Bills have outpaced wages to the point nearly a whole generation of young adults have given up on home ownership and have had to move back home.
Mortgages are increasing in years and rates, even new cars have.
Income inequality has never been higher and you're seriously saying it's gotten better since the greatest wealth transfer in history?!
> In states like Texas minimum wage is still $7.25/hr and many places pay just that.
> How do you reconcile your numbers with that?
'Assistant Commissioner for Regional Operations Stanley W. Suchman noted that the 196,000 workers earning the federal minimum wage or less made up 3.1 percent of all hourly paid workers in the state. Nationwide, those earning the federal minimum or less accounted for 2.3 percent of the hourly paid workforce.'
And that's only those paid hourly, not salaried.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w310...
It doesn't matter what the minimum wage is though, it matters what people are actually paid. Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage and they're doing okay.
> Bills have outpaced wages to the point nearly a whole generation of young adults have given up on home ownership and have had to move back home.
Not true, and Texas is fairly affordable. (It's blue states that aren't because they all refuse to build homes.)
https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r...
> Mortgages are increasing in years and rates, even new cars have.
Rate increases theoretically don't affect the total price of a new mortgage because you can negotiate the sale price down to make up for it. Supply and demand is what controls the total price. Higher rates do reduce new construction though.
Cars got more expensive because they stopped making cheap new cars, which is bad, but it's not 100% of CPI any more than rent is.
> Income inequality has never been higher and you're seriously saying it's gotten better since the greatest wealth transfer in history?!
No, income (wage) inequality peaked in 2014 and has been flat since, then decreased since 2019.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inequality-might-be-going-down...
The real great wealth transfer in history was the 2020 CARES act giving a lot of money to the poor. We should do it again. (This is the one that a lot of people online like to say "we only got $600" about which is a straight up lie. It was up to $2400/month for an unemployed mother with children.)
The one that went up is wealth inequality, meaning value of unrealized assets like stock portfolios. But that's not nearly as real as cash. (Also, our top tech billionaires Gates/Bezos/Musk helped inequality out by losing half of their wealth by cheating on their wives or buying Twitter.)
It’s more complicated than that, and you know it, or you’re using that fact to further your point somewhat disingenuously. Yes, there in no minimum wage defined by law, but in practice it’s around €20 due to the collective bargaining agreements (read: unions) in most industries.
There's nothing to hide here. Just look at the median wage in both places. Or in this case, the lowest 10% wage.
I prefer Australia's wage board system, but I think nobody knows how it works because they're Australian so they've given stupid names to everything. Try and guess what "award" and "casual loading" mean.
Though that assumes the "everything" in the post is an exaggeration because I think the price of "everything" is inflation.
Or, as many people suspect, the government calculation of inflation is deliberately under representing it. The government doesn't like to admit it is the cause of inflation, hence all the excuses for it coming from the government, like "Putin's Price Hike" and all that other economically illiterate nonsense.
Companies can raise their prices at any time. So why don't they? Why do they do it only after the government dumps trillions of newly printed money into the economy?
Inflation does nothing on its own; it does not have agency. It's just a description of a symptom (increase in price). Whether that set of symptoms (Disease) is caused by price gauging or labor price increases or resource prioritization is not known just from inflation.
Although if you see that profits are way up then you know its not due to labor price increases as that company's revenue and expenses would both be up and not just revenue.
If I pour water into a cup and the line says 100 ML there's 100 ML of water. That measurement of 100 ML is a descriptor of how much water that is.
Inflation is a descriptor of how much prices have increased.
If we measure the line a second time and it says 120 ML then the water level has increased (i.e. inflation occurred). But why inflation occurred is not know _just_ by measuring the water level.
If firms increase their prices by 10% then the firm is causing inflation (prices have increased). If said firm also gets a 10% increase in their profits then we people would say inflation is entirely driven by profits (although probably strictly inaccurate). However at no point does "inflation" cause something. Inflation is _just_ a measurement.
--
Sticking with the incorrect math, if your prices go up 10% and your profits go up 10% you are the cause of inflation.
If your suppliers increased their prices by 10% so you increased your prices 10% then your profit goes up 0% and if your suppliers profit went up 10% then they're the cause of inflation.
This second example is why people are getting upset. Companies are all complaining they need to raise prices "due to inflation" but since their profit margins are just getting better people are suspicious of how much of the price increase is dictated by their supplier's price increases versus greed (value pricing).
Au contraire. Inflation comes from too much money chasing too few goods and services. How does too much money come about? The government prints money to deficit spend. Why does this cause inflation? The Law of Supply and Demand. Too much money means the money is worth less.
Individual companies cannot cause inflation, because they cannot increase the money supply.
No, you really don't know what the word inflation means in the economic sense.
>> https://www.google.com/search?q=define+inflation
>> ECONOMICS
>> a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money.
Also companies can 100% increase their prices and if a singular company such as Exxon does it then pretty much every company will also increase their prices because their cost of revenue went up.
> companies can 100% increase their prices
Only if the consumers have the money, and are willing to pay it and not their competitor.
Where do they get the extra money?
So to move on to your new topic, there is a framing problem here. There does not need to be extra money during a period with inflation.
If I had $100 dollars and potatoes are $2 and a car is $50 I can get 25 potatoes and 1 car. If the costs of a car increases to $80 I can get 10 potatoes and 1 car. Inflation has occurred and I haven't done any changes to the money supply here.
And then of course, Inflation isn't a new word post-Bretton Woods; there was inflation when people used gold as currency.
The price used to be $8 because they were in a tight battle with other burger joints, and that was as low as they could get it. Now they have to fight their suppliers, but not so much with their competition.
This is one of the reasons why high inflation creates unstable inflation, and why central banks like to keep inflation low.
It's sibling is "demand-pull" where customer demand causes inflation, but it equally does not explain where the extra money comes from.
A theory that does explain it is the government dumping cash into the economy - inflation consistently picks up about a year after this is done.
More importantly, this is why I said that inflation becomes more unstable when it is higher. Dramatic price increases can happen as companies become less competitive, and then price collapses can happen as well as consumers tap out and companies are forced to compete for a shrinking pie. Economists generally prefer low inflation rather than high inflation, even if all else is equal in real terms, because higher inflation brings higher volatility.
Lastly, this isn't necessarily the driver that initiates inflation, but it is a feedback loop that can propel it to overshoot an increase in the volume of money.
Reduced demand reduces prices. It's the Law of Supply & Demand at work.
The Law is always at work, even money is subjected to it. Increase the supply of money, and the value of a dollar drops accordingly. We see this effect as inflation.
In physics, we know that momentum is conserved. Any theory that deviates from that is wrong, even if we can't figure out why it is wrong.
Analogously, any economic theory that results in a "free lunch" is wrong. Any economic theory that denies the Law of Supply & Demand is also wrong. Bad government economic policies are nearly always the result of denying the existence of the Law of Supply & Demand, which is as doomed as denying the Law of Gravity.
Nothing stops the government from pretending that deficit spending is a free lunch, and they sell that notion at every opportunity. But the Law of S+D still applies.
The elephant in the room is the sheer size of the several trillions in deficit spending. There's just no way to ignore it and explain inflation away by suddenly every business is price gouging. It's not a compelling explanation at all.
You have to be careful when asserting this though, because demand does not mean what most people think it means. In particular, it does not refer to the number of people demanding a good, nor does it refer to a volume of goods purchased. A declining sales volume occurring together with rising prices does not violate the law of supply and demand.
However, there is also a stable equilibrium for a company to turn a similar profit shipping software of equal quality to a very large number of people for a very low price. Something like a spreadsheet or word-processing software. Now your software is cheap, or supported by ad revenue, and yet you can still remain highly profitable. If, however, your userbase started to shrink for whatever reason, you might have to charge the remaining users a large amount. Most will leave, but a few of those users may derive a lot of value from your software and are willing to pay, and you end up with the same economics as the CAD developer.
Software is of course an extreme example, where the marginal cost of production is approximately zero, but most industries outside of resource extraction have declining marginal costs with scale. That's why you can end up with high-quality cheap components (like cameras, etc) that are used in smartphones, where they have high-volume production, and very expensive specialty cameras for eg. microscopes, even though the specialty camera required much less investment of R&D to produce. It can only be sold at a high price because there is not enough demand to reach economies of scale that would allow a lower price.
So if for whatever reason, money was sucked out of the economy and the average person suddenly became very poor and could not afford a smartphone, it's possible that smartphone companies would compete hard to keep those customers and drop their prices. But if that doesn't make for a sustainable business, the smartphone makers have to drop production to sell only to a few wealthy buyers, the remaining phones will get much more expensive, because their components will be made in expensive fabs at smaller volumes. The total revenue will be lower, the GDP would be lower, but the average price of goods can still be higher. Especially when there's a large wealth disparity to make that high-price low-volume equilibrium stable.
Your theory of inflation does not explain why it isn't continuous, and tends to follow periods of enormous deficit spending. That's a common factor to inflationary episodes, not some industry figuring out how to gouge.
Inflation isn't a price increase in one item, but the scenario I presented above does not create a tradeoff between one item and another; it can apply to any and all category of manufactured goods or services where efficiencies of scale apply. Macroeconomists usually assume only a single fungible good anyway (a "widget").
One example of shrinkflation / cost fuckery here is cheese. We buy a kilo of it every time, but they've changed it so you get e.g. 920 grams. Looks the same size, but it's slightly different, thus hard to make comparisons. Still up 30% since before the Ukraine thing though.
(I love Aldi! But I think such regulation would be pretty silly. But we already have such regulation in many parts of the world for many goods. Eg publ in the UK can't just sell you 500ml of beer, they need to give you a pint.)
Those extracting profit from deceptive packaging would do better to extract a moral lesson from the provenance of the baker's dozen.
Removed because it was, unsurprisingly, not the lowest common denominator EU wide. It's almost universally considered a tragic loss, I guess the only exception are those whose job description includes getting creative with packaging size.
(The old rule had lots of exceptions and loophole anyway. I remember that fresh yeast almost always came in little cubes of something like 42g, because that's a convenient amount for baking. And no one had any problems with that.
Do you really want bureaucrats or politicians to decide on arguments about what odd sizes are convenient enough to warrant granting such exceptions?)
However, I do remember shopping in Britain, where Tesco would give you the mandated unit price for one kind of apple per piece and the next box over with a different variety of apple would give you the unit price per kg. British supermarkets were a bit customer hostile like that. (I noticed them get a lot better when Aldi and Lidl really took hold in the UK. Especially those confusing '5-for-3' deals etc got much rarer.)
When packages are random sizes and always varying, it's impossible for anyone in adjacent industries to develop synergies.
List the price per litre or per kg, for instance, for every item in addition to the item's price and people can then compare between different brands on the shelf. This is already done in many cases though I do not know if there is a legal obligation.
People are not stupid by the way, they notice when an item they are used to buy shrinks.
Many countries have such legal obligations. Details obviously depend on jurisdiction.
A grocery story where all the isles are filled with identically sized boxes full of standardized products sounds pretty depressing, for one thing.
My salary did not increase 35% between this and last year. For Church & Dwight (Arm and Hammer brand manufacturer) to not only increase the price by at least 35% with shrinkflation, I wonder where the extra profit are going toward.
When I just immigrated 20 years ago, I used to be in awe at the size of commodities and food portions in the US. Nowadays, things are shrinking noticeably and eventually, stuff bought in the US would look just the same in terms of size as what's available in Burma (Myanmar), which is my home country. That observation makes me feel like the US (and probably all of the affluent western nations) is approaching the end of the era of abundance, and life for the future generation would be tougher. Pretty sad/concerning to think about it.
From the front it looks like a normal jar, from the side I actually started laughing at this skinny little thing with a giant overhanging lid.
That assumes there's extra profits. They also have to pay for materials, labor, etc. which have also gone up recently. Perhaps they're making the same profit (amount or percent) they were 4 years ago at that size/price?
BUT, we don't really know how these gross margins are actually calculated (meaning, the reporting is all done by these corporations with very complicated accounting methodologies). All things considered though, 41.9% gross profit margin for 2022 is still pretty good. With the supply chain easing, I am very curious to see how that profit margin looks like in 2023.
My totally unsubstantiated guess is like this: labor probably got a 10% bump since COVID; raw materials and oil/gas (for transportation) probably also had like 10-20%% bump in total. Then the remaining 5% (from 35% increase in just the price, NOT including the profit from shrinking) is probably going toward the extra coffers of the corporations.
Thanks for raising this subtle point though. :)
Clearly I spent far too much time overanalyzing this…
Haagen Dazs recently reduced the size of their ice cream containers from 500ml to 450 ml while keeping the price the same.
Fine. They succumbed to shrinkflation.
But it's only at the checkout counter where you get hit with the stealth price increase.
In Canada, they tax individual items of certain foods but don't tax family-size portions of those foods.
It turns out that 500ml is the limit for family-sized portion of ice cream container. Buying less than 500ml results in the store charging tax on the item (Ontario HST is 13%).
So Haagen Dazs is getting a bit more and the government gets some where before they got nothing.
see https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/shrinkflation-canada-ta...
https://www.cdiscount.com/au-quotidien/alimentaire/nestle-cr...
** than a box with 20%less no change in package size required. This was on a thing of Oldspice antiperspirants.
I think "all that matters" needs qualifying to "all that matters to some people".
I’ve been meaning to write to the manufacturer to ask if they’ve quietly changed their formulation to something more concentrated, though I have a pretty good idea of the canned response I'd receive.
Edit: this is what Carrefour is doing to an extent, but we don't have them in the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/stop-using-so-much-l...
I've been running my loads at 1/4 or less of the soap recommended by the manufacturer for years and years and I've never had any issues out of my washer, mechanical or clean wise. Once or twice a year, something will need a second wash or spot treatment, but otherwise everything is pristine.
Water from a municipal supply is generally well-treated and usually soft, in which case you can get by using less detergent. However with hard water (often sourced from wells), more detergent is needed to get the same cleaning effect.
Maybe they could try to explain this, or maybe they just ignore it for the sake of simplicity (of the instructions on the bottle), and the increased sales is just a nice side effect.
Personally, I use a bit less than 1/3 of the recommended amount of the laundry detergent I buy. It's plenty, and maybe it is still too much.
But also carrefour (and large retailers like them) are notorious for abusing their power when buying, and are a large part of the systemic problem. I don't know how much this is negotiating technique.
100%. What else would it be?
(If you have much faster turn over than other places your customer's shop that could also reinforce the perception that you are complicit.)
If they’re just wielding power over manufacturers, they also have the power to give into negotiations to remove the labels if manufacturers pay enough.
Which means it’s ultimately no longer about benefiting the customers, but squeezing as much as they can from manufacturers, and we end up with only get part of the truth.
This is a good idea, shame drives change, and it's good that customers get better information.
But also, the customer rarely benefits from large monopolies leveraging their power. Somehow they're always the losing bystander in these battles. I'm suspecting that the real motive is different, and I don't know the long term consequences of how they're gonna leverage that new negotiation tool. (maybe they won't display it if the manufacturer gives them a discount?). And then maybe it's just marketing, maybe there's no motive, and they want to show they are supportive of their customers. But then once a buyer realizes the tool they have to leverage an extra discount, it may change.
Forgive for being suspicious when an actor that has historically always been acting on their own capitalistic interests starts doing something that is not.
Sorry, but I'll ask for them to be punished when they try to do the bad thing. Not earlier.
They can do nefarious things whenever they want. They don't need to normalize a good thing first, there are all kinds of anticompetitive actions they can do right now without complex scheming. (And yeah, they constantly do many of those, but still, without any complex scheming.)
> Carrefour CEO Alexandre Bompard, who also heads French retail industry lobby group FDC, has repeatedly said consumer goods companies are not cooperating in efforts to cut the price of thousands of staples despite a fall in the cost of raw materials.
> The shrinkflation warnings are in all French Carrefour stores, and will last until the targeted suppliers agree to price cuts, Bompais said.
100% just a negotiation tactic
They have a lot of abusive rules in contracts which are unrealistic. Like, you must deliver your stuff to market X precisely at 2AM, not before not after, and for every minute of delay you pay a large fine. Now, when trying to deliver to N markets during same night, there's always delays in some of the places because the recipients in market Z are slow - fines are on the producers.
All the extra promos etc in supermarkets (buy 2 get 3) are funded by the producers as well.
$2.99/Kg (since 18/09/2023)
$2.79/Kg (previous price)https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
They would probably change the SKU so the comparison is harder.
Forcing an SKU change to have to translate to a "clearly labeled name change as well" would also help.
Could change it to "show last year of price info". In fact, make it a lineplot (with standardized design).
Unless there is a really strong pattern, I think that might be a situation were you shouldn't assume malice when stupidity will do.
I think it's quite likely they get the data from that from some feed who's ultimate source (or sources!) is someone keying in whatever's most convenient without any organizational consistency controls between items.
IIRC, every package has to have a weight/volume measure, but that doesn't make the most sense as the "unit" for many products, and there's even room for legitimate disagreement on what the right measure should be (e.g. should you list a package of sliced cheese by the slice, to use the unit the consumer is probably thinking in, or by the oz, to make it comparable to non-sliced cheese).
Some states offer a “scanner bounty” when items transitioned from sticker labeling to scanner pricing with only shelf tags, because vendors would often not update the shelf tags or item tags appropriately when they changed the scanner database. Find an error and receive 10x the difference up to $5.
https://www.michigan.gov/ag/consumer-protection/consumer-ale...
You will rapidly find stores becoming less incompetent overnight once they have an incentive to be. It’s not that they’re not capable of being competent, there just isn’t a legal requirement or a market incentive to be competent. A law without a penalty for (knowing or un-knowing) noncompliance is just a polite request.
They are profiting and thriving off the tendency for good-natured people to adopt the “incompetence, not malice” mindset and then accept that as a normal standard of behavior. After all, what can be done? Sho ga nai.
Presumably the people that write the integrations shop in grocery stores, and have noticed the issue.
Its extremely convenient that the mandated data that helps customers cut through the millions they spend on marketing and pricing schemes is the one that is completely uncared for.
It is definitely malice because they use every unit imaginable to avoid allowing you to compare within an item type (kg, lbs, oz, g, fl oz, “unit” (where unit = package))
I can remember using them like 10 years ago…
It also allowed me to spot some shady pricing practices, the recent one: dishwasher tablets are 10% cheaper when buying a bunch of smaller packages, rather than a big one. I still buy the latter as it results in less waste but it pisses me off to know how unnecessary and bad for the environment these practices are.
It makes comparing between products much easier.
Oh, it’s only 4 grams of sugar per serving. Oh, a serving is 1 bite.
I wish they would require a second column that is per ounce (for everything) so you could compare different foods.
Also, they should have to write everything to two significant figures. There are massive rounding errors on most labels.
* see tacit collusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion
> For example, Carrefour said a bottle of sugar-free peach-flavored Lipton Ice Tea, produced by PepsiCo, shrank to 1.25 liters (0.33 gallons) from 1.5 liters (0.3 gallons), resulting in a 40% effective increase in the price per liter.
Assuming the price per unit stayed the same (which is the implication), this is a 20% effective increase, not 40%.
In addition to the volume reduction, the price also went up from 1.45€ to 1.63€.
So the price per litre went from 0.97€/L to 1.36€/L. Much closer to the 40% figure.
For me this already solves the problem, because what I really care about isn’t whether I get 500g or 400g of coffee, I care about the real price compared to the other options on the shelf.
Toilet rolls are a great example. Sometimes you see the 24 pack "on sale" or "buy one get one half price" yet the cost per roll (unit) is higher than if you were to buy a 16 pack. Yes you would have less overall toilet rolls and that may be an issue for you but you are paying less per toilet roll.
Laundry detergent is another common one. Look at the price per litre of the item "on sale" and compare it to the not on sale sizes/packs as well.
People generally/instinctively expect/feel that if you buy the bigger pack you get a better deal and the companies certainly make you feel that is true but you have to pay attention as more often than not the best deal isn't the deal they're promoting.
Without that information, the other plausible narrative is more like, "Governments try to cover up the negative consequences to consumers of their massive inflation of the monetary supply by forcing companies to continue providing products at the same price (especially products like food staples that are included in consumer price indices)."
In all likelihood, it's probably both the government officials and the execs/owners who are profiting off the situation at the expense of everybody who still needs to eat food.
Examples: https://i0.wp.com/sfnoticias.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
i was thinking things like leaderboards, smartphone apps and big databases. "let the retailer slap a sticker on it to build customer loyalty" is the simple and elegant solution i missed.
> Consumer groups say “shrinkflation” is a widespread practice, which supermarkets like Carrefour are also guilty of in their private label products.
Get a wife, love and treat her well, and she'll likely cook for you.
I could help worded my post differently but decided I would rather attract some downvotes and maybe have some fun with comments like yours.
Edit: your profile is so much fun. Is that Serbian?
Yes, but I guess the neutral spirit of your comment is just “Things are getting out of hand so maybe we should all just cook for ourselves”
It got repealed in the 80s under pressure from manufacturing AND commercial lobbys.
[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almana...
They especially love -ing endings and will stick them on when it wouldn’t make sense in English. Ever notice the French for shampoo on also-sold-in-Canada shampoo bottles in the US? Shampooing. As a noun. And that’s not some Quebecois thing, it’s French French. Maybe they also like the “sh-“, and that made “shrinkflation” appealing.
They also use “parking”. “Le parking”. As in parking lot. Again, as a noun.
[edit] Shampooing is said “sham-pwan”, more or less, hitting the “n” rather softly, but parking is spoken almost the same as in English.
(Tuxedo and blow dry, respectively.)
"Consumers can use this information to make accurate and informed purchasing decisions about the amount of product they are buying."
Only if I can remember from one purchase to the next what the price per gram of a specific bar of Lindt chocolate is.
What makes you think that they are not changing ingredients as well, at the same time? It’s just another button they can tweak to increase margins.
If we follow that kind of logic, then we never put in place any regulation because it would just push people towards worse behaviours. A bit like when people who don’t want taxes say that it would just lead to tax evasion. In reality, there is room for reasonable regulations.
> I’m a fan of just mandating price per ounce labels on everything.
There is already a law to that effect.
> Stores could show current price per ounce and last year’s, no calling out specific brands, just make that data available to consumers on each price tag.
That would be definitely interesting. At the moment they just have to put the old price during sales.
To develop the idea further, most grocery shopping should move online, so I could trivially filter out products with shrinkflated packaging, containing palm oil, nestle brands, etc.
I've always thought "from -> to" so I'm curious when people use "to <- from".
Is it more common in the UK? Is there a name for this?
(See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37250458)
That's only a 20% -- rather than 40% -- effective increase in the price-per-volume, right?
[Calculation on WolframAlpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28+%281%2F1.25%29+-+%2...
Trying to figure out what went on there. For example, maybe they meant that the price-per-volume did go up 40%, and they meant that the reduced-size contributed to (rather than "resulted in") that 40% increase? Or, maybe ChatGPT did the math?
No reason to doubt this, given:
> “Obviously, the aim in stigmatising these products is to be able to tell manufacturers to rethink their pricing policy,” Stefen Bompais, the director of client communications at Carrefour, said in an interview.
Long story short, Carrefour doesn't actually give a shit about the deception of customers, except to the extent that their natural rage can be redirected against its suppliers in order to soften negotiating positions. Shrinking their margins either helps maintain total sales revenue, or shifts a larger share of the operating margin to Carrefour.
Carrefour cares about volume pricing, not the size of the packages.
Wish I could be surprised at Nestle doing the most evil thing possible, but here we are.
Seems like just a negotiation tactic against their suppliers versus doing something pro-consumer.
E.g, they went from Big to Small and then Small to Big.
It requires food manufacturers to add a notice on the package if they decreased the amount of content inside without making major changes to the look of the packaging.
1) At least in the US, most large companies converted to FIFO (first-in, first-out) accounting so, if today's input prices are up 10%, but a company raises by 5%, their profits skyrocket for a awhile, and then trend down when inventories and long term/sunk costs like leases, amortization of R&D, and labor contracts catch up.
I had heard about that anecodtally about a local supermarket chain and I was frankly surprised at the time. As most consumers, I also thought that the supermarkets were the ones profiteering. A giant like Carrefour having to call out the manufacturers just shows how much this practice has been used and abused.
Something I never used to see, across dozens of U.S. states, is sales tax being added separately to the posted price of beeer. But now, when I pay $8 for a 16-oz. drink, they often add the sales tax to that instead of including it in the price as they used to. I guess few enough people pay cash any more that making change with coins doesn't slow down the process too much.
These days, chocolate bars are all bite sized.
Although, like many more famous people who've made this observation: Where's the "fun" in less chocolate?
Around the world, you’re seeing sugar taxes, pushes for healthier snacks, and general government action against things that are sugar to excess.
Not saying they’re not greedflating like everything else. But they do have significantly different pressures.
Lots and lots of people prefer candy in small packages.
One of my favorite health food cereal brands now offers their stuff in just the plastic bag at a bit of a discount. The environmentally friendly packaging lands on the bottom shelf with the less reputable brands, but whatever.
(I’d prefer it just be in the cardboard with no plastic, but it is still a win).
https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/the-surprising-reason-wh...
Luckily, most places that claim to serve local food are just lying.
And anyway, remarks that are flip about changing consumer behaviors are beyond useless, for ignoring all of the complexity and difficulty in pulling it off. Or are you really giving advice to this educated and privileged audience that doesn't need to hear it because they already know and can?
To the other ones, well, just try replacing them.
Buy a different brand?
Eat something else?
2) Money supply is only part of the monetary influence on pricing pressure. velocity also matters - when people are saving stimulus funds, effective monetary stimulus is less than when people are scared and spending to protect against future price hikes
Turns out that (for most people) prepaid 3.50€/week mentally equates to 14€/month postpaid, whereas in reality it's closer to 15.20€/month (or an additional 8.7%, plus credit risk).
Here's the ice cream comparison if anyone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr-oq79iur4
Large supermarkets (Carefour, Intermarche, Ahold Delhaize) bully back by designing their house brand products to look exactly like AAA brands. In France this had led to cat and mouse game changes to colour scheme and shape rebranding.
Shrinkflation stickers are yet another (pretty brilliant) move in the chess game. AAA brands spend fortunes in commercials to guide customers to their product in the supermarket only to have them change their mind last moment in favour of the lower priced freeloader copy-cat.
/s
This is one reason the farm subsidy still exists.
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...
Paying more for less...yeesh.
Insert some clever parallel between RTO mandates and shrinkflation.
If someone will start packaging toothpaste in bulk liter sizes, I'll switch to that, and find some kind of more permanent dispenser to fill that looks better in my bathroom anyway.
At the same time, finding food that is high fiber, low salt and unsweetened is nearly impossible. Such food is literally made of precursor ingredients and subsets of the stuff added to the unhealthy stuff.
I switched to eating more of the latter, and feel much better in multiple dimensions. Also, most of what I eat now tastes better and is more filling. My weight is slowly going down too.
My current litmus test is that the fiber % daily value should be more than the carbohydrates %DV and the salt %DV should be less than it. I try to buy stuff with zero salt added (I have a nice collection of salty condiments at home already), and no sugar added (though that metric is already being gamed by manufacturers).
Simply avoiding all processed foods would achieve a similar effect, but that eliminates staple foods that are often loaded with salt, sugar or worse (e.g. yogurt, bread, peanut butter) and making them all from scratch is too time consuming.
I mean, this is pretty much anything in the fresh produce section. Chop it up and eat as a salad, made palatable with a sprinkle of salt (nowhere near as much as what is added to processed food) and a simple homemade vinaigrette (olive oil + vinegar).
> yogurt, bread, peanut butter
You should be able to find relatively healthy versions of each in a store; perhaps you'll need a trip to a health-focused store or Whole Foods, but it should definitely be possible to find plain-nothing-added yogurt, simple sourdough whole wheat bread, and plain-nothing-added peanut butter.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/carrefour-p...
I’ve never tried to use that feature. I looked for the feature because you asked.
I’d much rather have an AR app that scans a shelf, grays out anything that doesn’t meet my dietary preferences, and highlights the 3 cheapest options.
And if you can’t, more regulation won’t make that happen, either, see the failed "Nutri Score".
(unless you're explicitly checking the weight each time)
I have noticed e.g. with toilet roll when they decrease the weight they bundle it with a temporary discount so that the unit price remains the same (or even decreases for a bit)
then once the discount ends you've forgotten that they decreased the weight
it's a random walk, with the shrinkflation causing it to go upwards over time
it's the same trick e.g. Google does with Google Workspace, when they want to increase the price they:
- increase regular price, but introduce a new permanent "12 month plan" with the previous price
- six months down the line the 12 month plan is discontinued
Also, if you don’t commit to price comparison, how can "shrinkflation" be a problem? If you can buy whatever groceries you want anyway, just buy the ones that make you feel comfortable regarding their price policy...?
I roughly remember the sku price, I will notice if the milk goes up 15c
but I am not going to remember that last week it was 490g if they silently reduce it to 480g
this is why they do it... because it works
> Also, if you don’t commit to price comparison
I do price comparison at the point of purchase
but I don't remember the price/ml week to week
That's clear bait. What you're advocating for is a mental tax on the "less fortunate class" as you put it.
Make price transparency legally required and see how the game changes.
“Don’t patronize poor people, of course they are smart enough to remember the ever shifting prices and unit sizes of every product in the marketplace to calculate the real price changes in the goods they are buying.
Its also in tiny 8 point font.
Building a food price database is not something that one could easily do from the looks of it.
Why do you need half gallon specifically? Is there something about the half gallon form factor that other sizes doesn't satisfy?
Box of crackers. Was 450g weight. Now same size box has 400g. Price is same.
People buy by the package, not the quantity in the package.
Of course, giving customers information to make an informed decision is Bad For Business.
But I don't.
Liars deserve to suffer.
Now I'd totally expect a brand to just renew identifiers at random and break any tracking that doesn't help them.
You mean like....barcodes that are on pretty much every item ever?
So you wouldn't need store buy-in, because the challenge here isn't the QR code, it's the place where all that data is maintained. An app could scan the barcode, or you could manually enter the UPC into a website. If you think this is worthwhile, you could build this.
(I am sure that, since this is controlled by manufacturers, they will use this to remove as much information as possible from the actual product labels.)
But it seems to me that, given the fact the stores in the article were the ones supporting the move, that this would be a viable way to track and display price changes over time independent of information manufacturers control. It wouldn't do to pull data from a hostile source.
When ppl notice inflation, they swap to enshitification.
When ppl notice enshitification, they will create new brands at higher price points.
And so the cycle continues.
Perhaps because it's a rewrite of another article originally for European audience - for example https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/14/carrefour-p...
CNN removed the French photo and also introduced a mistake - when they converted "1.5 litres" for US audience they wrote "0.3 gallons" instead of "0.4"
In basic microeconomics, taxes, market power, and other market distortions create deadweight loss. Again, the higher price is borne by the consumer, regardless where in the supply chain/production process it is injected. Higher costs can flow through without deadweight loss, but again this is all in the static scenario.
Local taxes on soda in American cities have demonstrably lowered sales of those drinks, in those jurisdictions. Buyers are sensitive to price. In fact, demand for sugary drinks is highly elastic. A tax of just 1¢/oz in Oakland caused a 27% decline in sales, without countervailing increases of sales in neighboring markets without the tax.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
From the PLOS article: "There were no detectable changes in purchases of untaxed beverages or sweet snacks or purchases in border areas surrounding cities."
From the post you replied to: "without countervailing increases of sales in neighboring markets without the tax."
Why do you even bother replying?
Critically the biology around weight loss is complex but even with very intentional diet changes people rarely keep weight off long term.
Don’t get me wrong obesity does relate to the overall abundance of calories, my point is that singling out soda or candy isn’t going to do much by itself.
I’ve looked into this a while ago and while consumption falls no studies showed a change in weight from soda bans. Unless you have something more recent?
If they are bad products, why are you trying to sell them to me? Carry something from a brand that doesn't employ dark patterns to deceive me.
It's literally the job of the market to editorialize and choose the best options for the limited shelf space.
The only other business I’ve seen with such a constant flow of customers is In n out. Sure its good to have healthy margin but when you are getting 10x the number of daily transactions as your nearest comparable business in the area, you are playing a different game from them entirely.