Why stop there or wait for the shrink to come to the conclusion? At least it's easier to eat 1 than 0.5 and store it though, and more work to open 2 than 1.
I'm not sold the magnitude of the effect is really worth much though.
That's my hunch as to what's driving this. Some suit at Mars calculated that shrinking the size of a bar will compel enough consumers to purchase an additional bar, thus selling 2 bars instead of one, essentially doubling the revenue from many customers. The suit probably got a huge promotion/bonus for this incredible work, benefiting all of humanity. /s
Let's say Mars sells the bars to distributors for 20 cents and it costs 10 cents a bar to make and package.
A pound of milk chocolate costs $5 and you can get 250 bars out of it. Meaning, every bar has 2 cents of chocolate.
Chocolate prices go up to $6/pound. Now, every bar has 2.4 cents of chocolate. You can maybe eat that cost. Depending on the price increase of other ingredients. Eventually, chocolate hits $10/lb and you are spending 4 cents per bar on chocolate.
You can increase your price, OR you can use less chocolate per bar. You can slightly shrink the dimensions of every bar and use a thinner layer of chocolate to get your costs back in line with 2 cents per bar.
Everyone is going to notice your prices increasing. Fewer people are going to notice your sizes decreasing.
And that's your choice. Mars decided that they were going to limit serving sizes to 250 calories or less, and products shrank or were dropped in line with that.
This was a better idea than simply saying a single use package really contains more than one serving in it to look like the company was being responsible.
You choosing to eat more is just that, your choice. It has nothing to do with any company.
If the original larger bar contained more calories as well as higher quality ingredients requiring more time to digest, then the older bar may actually have been the healthier option.
You could always eat two. But most people are inclined to use one as a "serving".
The same thing has been said about pints of ice cream. They are (or were?) labeled as being 2.5 servings - reasonable - but lots of people just ate them whole and then complained that they had too many calories.
They even sell two in one pack. I believe "king size" was banned at some point (probably some EU thing if I had to guess) so they now sell "duo" packs which are for "sharing" to get around it.
Only if we acknowledge that this is due to greed not health consciousness.
Always remember: if McDonalds could legally and without risk of negative PR: _double_ the average customer spend at the cost of _halving_ their life expectancy - this would bring the same revenue in half the time which would be a great corporate decision.
These people see a normal healthy person as an underutilised resource. The fact that a person could be a healthy weight means they have not consumed enough product. These people are pure scum and the only worse parasites on earth are in private equity on Wall Street.
As your link points out, in Dutch this is also known as "komkommertijd" ("cucumber time"), and in German as "Sauregurkenzeit", ("pickled cucumber time").
The funny thing is that apparently "cucumber time" also existed as an expression in English for a while in the 18th century. One suggested etymological origin for the Dutch "komkommertijd" was as a loan work from the English around the same period, except ttat it survived after the English stopped using it. According to some sources cited on the Dutch wiki page the expression was mainly used by German tailors in London.
The modern German equivalent would probably be "Sommerloch" [1], describing the time when most politics is on hold because of summer vacations and news outlets try to fill the void with whatever story they find. The usual writers and editors being on vacation too during this time doesn't help.
Shrinkflation implies a furtive change that the customer is supposed ideally not to notice, but the big 2002 revision of the Mars recipe wasn't that. Masterfoods felt (no doubt with good reason) that consumers were turning against the old, stodgy Mars bar so they remade it into a lite product, basically a Milky Way variant, to win them back. https://www.just-food.com/news/uk-mars-re-branding-offers-co... Unfortunately the result was still a horrible downgrade https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49245791 .
It has got to be bad. I noticed full size lays bags are now stamped for $7 and change. $7 for a bag of potato chips you'd think that was crazy bougie organic chip prices with some dill and Himalayan pink salt. But no, that's what lays and cheetos are going for.
That’s measuring price discrimination on an impulse buy. You have to compare wholesale prices for any kind of shrinkflation comparison across one product.
$7 sounds like what I’d pay at my neighborhood liquor store, not Walmart or Costco.
I agree $7 sounds steep but go ahead and look at the grocery store and be as shocked as I was. They are stamped this way from the factory. I was shocked.
I’m in LA in a very high CoL area and my nearest Walmart has a 13oz Lays family sized bag for $4.77. I see $5.99 at the local high-ish end grocery store. Both on Instacart. My favorite Mexican grocery store afew miles way has 8oz bags on their weekly ad right now for $2.33 a bag if you buy 3, so that’s $6.99 for 24oz instead of 13oz.
I believe you, but like I said, you’re complaining about price discrimination not shrinkflation. Either due to regional cultural differences or because your grocery store has so little competition they can charge a lot more, or you’re going to an expensive store out of habit or convenience (which is why my local grocery store can charge $5.99).
They don't have to be perfectly innocent - it's still a big win if they were way more innocent, which they were. All kinds of products, from food to clothes, had better ingredients and fewer cheap substitutes.
Actually I do remember the clothes being better quality - I still own one of the t-shirts that was one of the first things I ever purchased over the internet, it is a bit worn out now but it's lasted an order of magnitude longer than any I had since
I'm skeptical about the food though, all the artificial ingredients and cheap substitutes were well under way by then
I'd believe that the 90s on food industry was way worse than now in some ways, almost no control I suppose, already at least a decade of creating shareholders values etc.
I forget when it was required to list ingredients. But I'd also imagine the regulations were more relaxed, you could list "Milk chocolate product" and have it pass.
You're thinking of it from the wrong perspective. Lots of formulas were changed so that ingredients were substituted with cheaper alternatives. There's an artificial chocolate that uses no cocoa used by lots of items claiming to be chocolate. Just because people are more aware of it does not mean the companies are not using the cheaper formula. One of these stories was recently in the news about Reese's peanut butter cups[0]. So it seems to be one of the rare times evilCorp relented under public pressure instead of stock price pressure
In the 90s it was more common to find aspartame and artificial colors in candy (although those haven't disappeared), but less common to find polyglycerol polyricinoleate and similar emulsifiers in chocolate.
589 comments
I'm not sold the magnitude of the effect is really worth much though.
Let's say Mars sells the bars to distributors for 20 cents and it costs 10 cents a bar to make and package.
A pound of milk chocolate costs $5 and you can get 250 bars out of it. Meaning, every bar has 2 cents of chocolate.
Chocolate prices go up to $6/pound. Now, every bar has 2.4 cents of chocolate. You can maybe eat that cost. Depending on the price increase of other ingredients. Eventually, chocolate hits $10/lb and you are spending 4 cents per bar on chocolate.
You can increase your price, OR you can use less chocolate per bar. You can slightly shrink the dimensions of every bar and use a thinner layer of chocolate to get your costs back in line with 2 cents per bar.
Everyone is going to notice your prices increasing. Fewer people are going to notice your sizes decreasing.
This was a better idea than simply saying a single use package really contains more than one serving in it to look like the company was being responsible.
You choosing to eat more is just that, your choice. It has nothing to do with any company.
The same thing has been said about pints of ice cream. They are (or were?) labeled as being 2.5 servings - reasonable - but lots of people just ate them whole and then complained that they had too many calories.
Always remember: if McDonalds could legally and without risk of negative PR: _double_ the average customer spend at the cost of _halving_ their life expectancy - this would bring the same revenue in half the time which would be a great corporate decision.
These people see a normal healthy person as an underutilised resource. The fact that a person could be a healthy weight means they have not consumed enough product. These people are pure scum and the only worse parasites on earth are in private equity on Wall Street.
(posted below, too -- I'll stop now.)
The funny thing is that apparently "cucumber time" also existed as an expression in English for a while in the 18th century. One suggested etymological origin for the Dutch "komkommertijd" was as a loan work from the English around the same period, except ttat it survived after the English stopped using it. According to some sources cited on the Dutch wiki page the expression was mainly used by German tailors in London.
[0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komkommertijd
- [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sommerloch (links to "silly season")
Viral stories generally don’t come with any maths at all.
$7 sounds like what I’d pay at my neighborhood liquor store, not Walmart or Costco.
I believe you, but like I said, you’re complaining about price discrimination not shrinkflation. Either due to regional cultural differences or because your grocery store has so little competition they can charge a lot more, or you’re going to an expensive store out of habit or convenience (which is why my local grocery store can charge $5.99).
I thought they called them candy bars in the states?
No, but it is bad if you're told by economists that prices arent going up.
Neither you nor the manufacturer are supposed to be my doctor.
I'm skeptical about the food though, all the artificial ingredients and cheap substitutes were well under way by then
Literally 1984.
[0]https://apnews.com/article/hershey-reeses-chocolate-peanut-b...
Eg. Mayonnaise contained eggs and oil instead of the weird crap + sugar mayonnaise is made of now.
Also even things like the vegetables has more minerals in and the chicken had less fat in it.
What is weird in here.
> INGREDIENTS: SUGAR, GLUCOSE SYRUP, COCOA BUTTER, FULL CREAM MILK POWDER, COCOA MASS, SUNFLOWER OIL, SKIMMED MILK POWDER, LACTOSE, WHEY POWDER (FROM MILK), FAT REDUCED COCOA, MILK FAT, BARLEY MALT EXTRACT, SALT, EMULSIFIER (SOYA LECITHIN), EGG WHITE POWDER, PALM FAT,
There's nothing particularly weird in it. Soy lecithin is probably the weird one, but it's in a lot of plain chocolate bars, and is pretty benign.
Slow shrinkflation, then one day "now bigger!" (with a price increase) and then repeat.