Shrinkflation is out of control
Shrinkflation is out of control
Up untill a week ago Nofrills carried these "three packs" of salmon for $10. Now the same pack contains two for the same $10. I thought it felt light when I bought it yesterday.
This comes to about $0.02 increase per gram, and a $1.10 price increase overall. Or a 11% increase in price overall. Meanwhile inflation is at 6-7%?
The worst part of shrinkflation is that it ruins all the old mid-century recipes that were based on "convenience foods" and specified ingredients like "one can" of cream of mushroom soup or "one package" of jello. Nowadays you've got to use a can and a half, or whatever -- WTF am I supposed to do with half a can of leftover soup, assholes?!
The thing that pisses me off the most is “””eco-friendly””” companies doing shrinkflation. My guy, you can tell me it’s recycled plastic or whatever, if the portions are smaller you’re still pumping out more plastic than before, asshole.
Some countries have outlawed this behavior. If the seller/producer wants to decrease the package contents and keep the package size and price the same, they can (of course), but they must write on the package that the contents have decreased in large bright characters that are hard to miss. Something like this:
255gnow 200gI'm not sure where you are (assuming USA, based on the packaging), but it's not illegal in the USA, since consumer protection is near to nonexistent.
If it's not Shrinkflation, it's Diluteflation.
I occasionally see posts and news articles about how AriZona Tea Company has "held the line" and kept their giant cans of iced tea priced at 99 cents for so long.
Well, after drinking a few cans of the stuff recently, I'm almost certain they're watering down their product. The tea is nowhere near as concentrated as it was a few years ago. There's practically no flavor to it anymore.
The old fish costs $3.92 per 100g, the new fish $5. That's a price increase of (255/200 - 1) = 27.5%. The difference per gram (which isn't of interest to anybody) is 5-3.92, i.e. ¢1.08. Which also equates to a (5/3.92 - 1) = 27.5% increase.
Not sure what you were calculating, but every result was wrong.
Interesting that while there is only 2 instead of 3 in a pack, the total weight has gone down only 22% (from 255g to 200g, instead of 170g if the weight dropped by a third/33%). So the actual salmon pieces may be bigger?
This is still shrinkflation but there has probably also been previous hidden shrinkflation in the individual salmon pieces too and that bit has been slightly undone.
I love them sockeye... Watching them fight to get to spawning ground is something special to watch. One year I watched a group splinter off the Hoh river in Washington and make their way up a feeder stream. Ever day after school I'd run out to see where they were. So many started and only a few made it.
They literally saved my life. I was looking for somewhere to end myself when I found them. Their presence intrigued me and I decided to see it out. The day the last one spawned and died broke something in me, that hate I had. It's hard to explain but I was so overwhelmed by the experience I decided that if they can do that journey, i can do mine.
Thinking about it again always makes me so emotional.
Anyways that salmon is cheap and it should be cherished for what it is.
Sockeye Salmon are the best flavor of salmon.
I have lots of stomach issues and can't eat a lot of foods, which means I mostly eat the same few things over and over. One of the few things I can have reading out is a particular local restaurant's chicken strips, and I'd get them for lunch a couple times a month. They've raised their prices twice in the last 6 months, and what used to be 6-8 strips for$6 is now 5 chicken strips - just the chicken, no fries or other sides - for $10. If I'm feeling masochistic, I'll get myself and my father each one of their chef salads. Two of those are now $27. They are a very, very popular place and usually crazy busy, but since that last hike I've noticed the parking lot at lunchtime is often half empty. This is not a wealthy area, people can't afford these prices. They are going to greed themselves right out of business.
They've also lost every single long-time employee they had. And when I say long, I mean 15, 20 years working there. I watched most of them grow up, get married and have families. Every. Single. One. is gone, and I've seen most of them at other restaurants now. Their staff is now different every time I go in there, and service sucks and orders are frequently wrong. My work stopped ordering food from there for meetings because of it. Greed, greed, greed, with a healthy dose of apparent staff mistreatment. Story of the world at large nowadays.
There's a fresh Canadian fish market near my house. A huge piece of wild caught Atlantic salmon that can feed 3-4 of us is $28 or so after taxes. The salmon is fresh, delicious, and way more plump. Shrimp too, I buy a $20 pack of shrimp at food basics and it shrinks to nothing while cooking, and the $25 of fresh shrimp from the fish market stays huge and doesn't soggy my recipe
Permanently Deleted
You have to stop buying them now. That's the only way the prices will ever stabilize.
It's like that episode of Next Generation "Remember Me" when the universe is shrinking and everyone's disappearing and the Enterprise computer keeps gaslighting Dr Crusher trying to convince her it's fine, everything's fine, this is totally normal. But it's not fine, it really isn't.
I'm totally with you that shrinkflation is an issue.
But these nofrills packages are intentionally priced at an even value like $10. to the point that the price is written directly on the package not an in store label that they can update. I get things like chicken and sausage patties like this too. So instead of putting in 3 and updating the price to $15 or whatever they just take one out.
Additionally fish is not a staple good, generally fish is sold at "market price" because it's affected by populations and seasons and prices for fish vary significantly through the years because of this.
But again I agree and the best thing to do is pay attention and not buy things that you don't think are worth.
Who is gonna stop them? Nobody, so of course they’re pricing them above inflation. They’re there to make a profit, fuck you and yours and all that
I want to say this is one of the more obtuse examples of shrinkflation. A lot of it is simply to allow a product, usually something by weight like cereal (where you're not getting x individual pieces), to completely sell out, only to be replaced with one with nominally fewer grams of product while maintaining price. Usually with a 2-3 week gap between the old product and new. Usually it will come back with a redesigned box or something or new "eco" packaging that helps to distract from the fact that they just performed a 10%+ moneygrab on your lucky charms. Most people are content to just be able to buy the product again, and since it's been completely sold out with no product to compare with, there's less of a chance anyone is going to be able to have something to directly compare to when buying the updated product.
If they had instead sold 3x fillets at 200g, I have serious doubts even you would have noticed; but since they moved to larger, but fewer fillets, it's starkly obvious that something happened.
There's this fast food fried chicken chain called Raising Canes, used to serve massive strips. Now the price is 50% more expensive and 50% less chicken. They're extremely tiny, never going back again... yet all the zombies who love that place are relentlessly spending their money there anyway.
Edit: grammar
The bread rolls at the supermarket have gotten so comically small that you can't even use them to make a proper sandwich anymore.
While these price changes can certainly come in part from corporate greed, there may be some other costs at work being applied; the increased difficulty of agriculture in a world where the climate is getting out of control, or as someone else mentioned the war in Ukraine having an effect on agricultural exports from the area.
I'm at least trying to be flexible in my preferences. I try to be aware of the carbon offset associated to the food I buy, or the amount of land needed to produce it. We can also get a bit too used to certain foods actually being subsidized by the government, primarily meats. It doesn't necessarily mean I can eat cheaply, but sometimes I pick up an option I wouldn't normally consider that either saves me money or satisfies me even more.
I paid like $8 for 115g of marinated salmon last week because I wanted to try it, but it is getting ridiculous.
I always check price/weight, and its increase has been ridiculous. For ones that don't increase price also taste different, sadly. The best way to detect real value vs. price is look into nutrition tables but I don't have the all database memorized lol so they'll get away with it. :/
Highway robbery.
I’d have more sympathy if this was something like peanut butter or eggs instead of smoked wild salmon.
Bidenomics at work