South Korea Will Police 'Shrinkflation' at the Supermarket
wsj.com
wsj.com
Doesn't help detect changed ingredients that lower quality, though.
I thought this was a EU thing, but a quick search suggests that maybe it's something specific to us?
Some NZ supermarkets have that kind of labelling, but not always for every product.
My regular (soon to be former) cereal has gone from 700g to 620g to 535g in about 3 months, all for the same price. The box has the same width and height, but the depth has been shrinking.
The problem in the US is that food/ag corporations are powerful and always fight against this kind of consumer information. Same with ingredient and nutrition labelling. They want the consumer to have as little information as possible (information asymmetry is the term in economics).
Rather amusingly (to me!), lavatory paper has a price per sheet, which is abbreviated "sht"... https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/304782328
I hope the CMA comes down hard. It's disgusting.
"30p each or only 3 for £1" isn't a joke. I saw this in a London store when they tried making multi-pack offers near the checkout actually more expensive than picking up separate items.
"Meal Deals" are a fantastic scam that charge you more for eating less. If you don't take the crisps or drink it doesn't "count" as the meal-deal, and the individual items cost more. I end up buying an extra bag of crisps I don't want and giving it to the homeless person outside.
Like many British supermarkets they operate a three tier pricing structure, normal, discounted (with yellow labels) and "Clubcard" prices. These are applied to similar items on proximate shelves, so you're never quite sure which ones the offers apply to. Sometimes those little yellow stickers don't scan, and surprise.. you pay the original price.
And don't get me started on automatic checkouts, which are basically "mugging robots" designed to rob humans.
Supermarkets are playgrounds for screwing people over with little mind games. What a desolation of human life for those who waste their days thinking up this shit.
How is "If you add a third item the price sometimes goes down" a scam?
* £3.50 is the price. That means they'll make a profit on that. It's a "low" price because it's garbage, tasteless, low-quality junk food,
* The supermarkets know which items are more likely to sell separately. Like your bottle of water example. So those items are individually priced higher while others that rarely sell separately (like sandwiches) will be individually priced low. Whatever it really is, the supermarket has all the data, they know how to win.
Similarly, it's like how people think shoplifters steal from the supermarket. The supermarket knows how much stuff gets stolen each year. They price accordingly. Shoplifters steal from you.
This is wrong. They won't always make a profit. On some items they make a loss.
> * The supermarkets know which items are more likely to sell separately. Like your bottle of water example. So those items are individually priced higher while others that rarely sell separately (like sandwiches) will be individually priced low.
This is also wrong. These items a) have an actual unit price, which will differ depending on various factors, and b) compete with other vendors selling the same or similar, and c) need to be there or shoppers won't go the the shop in the first place.
There are many forces acting on these prices. Thinking profit is the only force is bound to be wrong.
I know about loss leaders, but I severely doubt meal deals are loss leaders considering they are placed at the front of the shop and customers often come in to buy them at lunch time. They are competing with the likes of Gregg's here.
It doesn't matter about the individual technicalities. What matters is the bottom line. You aren't beating Tesco.
I think it comes from everything they sell. You're taking the business' overall performance and seemingly attributing it all to people not buying meal deals when they could.
> I know about loss leaders, but I severely doubt meal deals are loss leaders considering they are placed at the front of the shop and customers often come in to buy them at lunch time.
This is the definition of a loss leader. Bring people in to buy it, and they'll buy a few other things at the same time.
> What matters is the bottom line. You aren't beating Tesco.
These conversation-ending grand statements aren't relevant. I'm not trying to beat Tesco.
How does that work? Are you saying they charge more for the same purchases?
Please place your item in the bagging area. Unrecognized item in the bagging area. Please scan items one at a time.
I have not seen those annoying checkout scales anywhere else in Europe.
There are no scales and nobody would notice if you just don't scan the item. In theory there are "random" checks. I've never seen one happen though. Not having a huge desperate underclass makes many things a lot smoother.
Grocery shopping in rich neighborhood = scale has a large tolerance and will not stop you from continuing to scan if you place something unexpected on it. You can scan and bag in whatever order without the machine making any accusations.
In a poor neighborhood = you scan an item and put it on the scale, then put your bag from home on the scale to bag the first item. The scale is set to a strict tolerance and stops scanning items “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA” and you have to wait for an employee to unlock it.
As they say “there’s nothing more expensive than being poor”, and bad self-checkouts is just another factor in that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsohPbnp1b8
(Skip to 3.25 in the video for the classic quote).
Another thing that annoys me is there being no indication of how long a sale or promotion is running. Lidl does this correctly, and puts a to/from date on the price tag in tiny text. (for internal use, I assume. but still super useful)
"Clubcard prices" somehow avoid the laws on misleading discounts as well, where the price you're discounting from needs to be the lowest price that product was on sale for for the preceding 30 days.
For example you might have price per sht (well you need at least 4 per sh*t ;) but there will also be a 2 for 1 offer with no price per sht and then a multi pack with no offer on it with a different price per sht. So you have three factors to compare to work out how many sh*ts per sht are best value. And then there's the confusion of loyalty card only prices.
I have got to the point I'd rather shop at Waitrose because they don't pull that sht.
On that note I think I'll go to Morrisons today and be mugged differently.
This is a beautiful sentence, i think.
Same sh*t, different day I suppose.
/g, /ml because its easier to say Rs. 2.04/g as compared to Rs. 204/100g. This makes so much more easy to compare
Incompatible goods. Buy 8 buns for a 6 hotdog package. Jam jars of 600 mL but refill packets of 750 mL. Absolute madness. Why do you do this?
Store's own brand is like 20-30% cheaper across the board. How is this even possible?
And the worst one:
Incompatible units in comparison price. You buy popsicles, one box has them in money/popsicle, one box has them in money/volume frozen water.
No need for marketing costs. Also companies compete for shelf space (sometimes they will have to pay to have their products placed in a favorable spot). Also they buy BULK. When (e.g. Tesco) buys bread they issue the recipe they want and they guarantee LARGE volumes.
Regarding the comparisons, in EU they got labels that give you cost per 100ml or 100gr or per item.
And I have a feeling they intentionally increase price of other brands to force people to buy store's brands.
And many individual products are still good enough.
Good thing to not be hooked by fake discounts.
Easy comparison – price per unit
You should also be able to compare prices between brands and between package sizes – to see, for example, what saving you'd make buying a large-size box of breakfast cereal instead of a small box.
To help you do this, all products must be marked not only with the selling price, but also the price per unit – for example, the price per kilo or per litre. This information must be understandable, easy to read, and easily identifiable.
This rule also applies to adverts that mention a selling price.
^0 https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...
^1 https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
I almost feel sorry for the producers
In particular Marabou, which is (debatably) some kind of gold standard for kids chocolate in Sweden.
I think they gradually decrease the amount of cocoa and check if customers accept it. And when they do it a little at a time of course no one notices.
"The price per unit is displayed with a font size of roughly 20 mm while the comparison price is just under 2 mm" (freely translated from Swedish)
https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/moti...
And it is a law that if you decrease the weight of the product, you need to call that out on the label.
It works great.
Or when I lived in Belgium it was per 100ml, or per liter, or per 100 grams which aren't necessarily the same.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/oct/21/shrinkflation-...
Sugar has been added to basically everything at our Canadian grocery stores. Some examples:
Creamcheese + 600% Fresh sausage + 300% Cold cuts + 300% Canned tomatoes + 400%
Of course this also coincides with Canada's lovely carbon tax (which is applied to our farmers).
Taxing the farmer is a problem because every person in the middle is marking up that carbon tax before passing it along. Just tax our food and call it a day. Otherwise companies will just continueto buy the tomatoes from Mexico and SHIP IT ACROSS 3 &$+#+$ COUNTRIES.
If you think about it most ultra processed food is packed with salt and/or sugar to hijack your brain and keep you hooked.
Big food is not joking around when it comes to addiction.
That is the point of a carbon tax, to apply it at the root cause of carbon emissions ensuring no one avoids paying the cost, and hence incentivizing everyone to reduce consumption.
And the tomatoes are coming from Mexico because that is where the procurers can get them at the best price to quality ratio for their customers. If you think you can find a better source, I am sure the stores would love to hear it, because they are not paying to ship them across multiple countries for fun.
They aren't exempt from the tax on (for instance) natural gas to heat a barn. Though I believe that is changing with Bill C-234.
The monthly subscriptions were turned into "four weeks" (28 days) ones, while “maintaining the same price”.
"We're simplifying your subscription, from now on you'll always pay every four weeks instead of a confusing varying month! :) Oh and don't worry the price stays the same! :) :)"
The 8.7 actual price increase was an unfortunate, unwanted side effect of course!! :(
Same goes for quality. Don't degrade your product. If it gets worse, chances are I won't buy it, no matter for what price you sell it.
If you instead keep the quality and increase the price then I might be willing to pay up just to enjoy my favourite brand of crisps.
That said, it is probably better for me that a regular sized bag of cripsps is now 175g instead of 200g.
There was a joke in eastern europe (after the berlin wall fell, and all kinds of fraud and high inflation were happening) - The average price of a liter of gasoline fell by 4% last month, the average volume of liter of gasoline fell by 7% ...
Completely agree: recently I wanted some peppermints, and I noticed the sugar had been replaced by "glucose syrup".
I didn't buy them, and I've done this for other products.
Are companies losing sales, which will make them "degrade their product" more as their revenues decline, which will lose sales, and so-on?
Most people, most times, can’t tell
Yes! Which is why we'll market it as New Slurm. Then, when everyone hates it, we'll bring back Slurm Classic, and make billions!
If "Chlorine Bleach" is diluted from 5.0% concentration (NaClO in H2O) to 4.5%, that's simple and obvious.
If the gallon of chlorine bleach is replaced with a 96oz. "ultra" version, which is 6.5%? Do some math - that's a slight reduction in the NaClO quantity.
If that "ultra" is 6.75%, that's a slight increase in NaClO quantity. Yet the manufacturer's sales and profits will very likely increase - because the "96 oz." will cut their packaging and transportation costs. And most people will not reduce the quantity of "ultra bleach" they use (in their mop bucket, washing machine, etc.) enough to offset the increased concentration. So (on average) customers will pay more money, for the cheaper-on-paper ultra bleach.
And that's a very simple situation. How do you police it if Acme Soup Co. is tweaking their recipes, to put cheaper ingredients and more water into each can?
So we could also add those to the "cheap ingredient list" but of course it's a never-ending battle and likely not to the benefit of the consumer.
I suppose we're actually dealing with a price distribution so maybe a possible solution is:
a graph where X is the procurement price per ingredient and Y is the percentage of the product that is composed of things with ingredient price <= X.
You'd want to have as small as possible an area under that curve but then the question is the procurement price and we've gone full circle.
This can be surprisingly dangerous. Home canning recipes expect vinegar to have a certain, long-standard level of acidity to be safe.
In the past year or two, some brands have very quietly change their acetic acid percentage.
Small changes in other ingredients can really throw off safe recipes, like tomatoes going from 15 oz to 14.5 oz. That changes acid levels, too.
And there's also the all-too-common offense of screwing up old recipes - because miserably large number of those specify quantities like "one can of pie filling", "two package unflavored gelatin", and "one medium onion".
Nothing can be done about the granny's collection of recipes on index cards, but I wish there was some "if you wanted to copyright your book or web site full of recipes, then you should have..." penalty for this.
And it's weird because when he brought this up with people, they were obviously passive about it, not knowing for sure since who actually remembers the old price of a single cadbury egg?
He even went on the website, and they said that "the eggs haven't gotten smaller, you've just gotten bigger". Not only do they know, they're trying to actively gaslight the population.
He then brings out an old egg he found and compares it to a newer one and it's definitely smaller.