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%?
This sucks. One of my favorite places to eat has both inflation and shrinkflation. Higher price for smaller portions.
More than likely their suppliers are bleeding them, a lot of restaurants in my town are dealing with the same shit
Yeah. One of my favourite restaurants closed a couple months ago because they just couldn't justify charging more for food, but their suppliers sure could.
Every place I used to eat pretty much. And they cheap out on cheap shit too, like fries and rice. I used to work at a restaurant and the owner always taught me to fill up the sides cause it makes people feel they got their money's worth
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?!
Americans in shambles as shrinkflation ruins their measurement system /s
LOL, it's true!
That said, it's certainly possible to have the same problem in metric. To the extent that you don't, it's probably because you're still cooking with real ingredients scooped into a container in a market instead of processed, packaged ones.
In other words, the thing you should really be gloating about is being less at the mercy of Cargill and Nestle and whatnot than us Americans are.
I'd try adding more milk or cream if you've already got some. I ain't wasting an extra can either. I'm the kind of person who puts a ton of beans in my chili compared to ground beef because I can't waste them lol
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:
I'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.
In the US it's actually illegal for companies to do something that benefits the consumer
Pretty sure this is Canada, no frills is a franchise chain under Loblaws. Loblaws is the kind of company that increases a product price by 20% and then puts up a "same price everyday" sign to gaslight customers.
Meanwhile Kroger raises their prices and then puts a giant yellow tag on them labeled "Everyday Low Prices".
It's not on sale, it's always more expensive than it was before, but they want you to think it's a discount.
Cool business move...... NOT!
(Should we even be bringing back the 'not'?)
Same price everyday (only for the day)
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.
I kinda doubt they would bother to water it down. Realistically the flavouring in it costs a fraction of a cent for them. If they changed it for any reason would probably just be to be healthier
Companies operating on that scale sell millions and millions of beverages. Even half a cent per can can add up to huge amounts of money. Also, their job is literally to sell containers of diluted high fructose corn syrup, so I don't think customer health is their priority.
Hmm I've been drinking it for years and don't notice that either. Maybe check the sell by dates on yours. They do kind of deflate over time.
Here in southern Ontario near the border we've been getting REALLY great deals on Arizona lately because our local market buys in bulk from across the border. I've never been able to get Arizona for 50 cents my entire life before. It must be overstock or something, but I'm having one or two like every day.
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.
Cost per gram is the only sensible measurement
and yet every single online grocery shopping I've been on refuses to have a filter or sort by price per weight option. It's even more incredibly infuriating when you have to click into an item's description or calculate it yourself, extra bonus hell points to the sites that change the weight metric so it's an extra step to figure out what the actual comparison is (probably more a US problem with ounce/pound conversion).
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.
Usually when I buy bigger packs of salmon, the amount varies and the only thing roughly consistent is the weight. So if they decreased the weight, you might either get 2 bigger fillets or 3 smaller fillets depending on the package
Packages says right on them 2 packs and 3 packs. So amount isn’t changing on these particular ones.
I'm on disability. Watching the prices climb the past few years has been genuinely distressing. I could never afford a full month of groceries but now I can afford even less. Food doesn't go nearly as far as it should. I find myself having to stretch stuff over days or do what I'm currently doing and just not eat for the better part of a week to save the little I have left.
I am not doing well and this shit is making it worse... I'm honestly afraid.
Don't be to humble to go to a food pantry. It's food for people who need it. I've used them. I'm not ashamed.
I recommend you check out TheFreePizzaDude on Imgur. There is a limit to how often you can receive donations (like once every other month), but they will help with getting you a pizza or even some regular groceries if you ask.
The absurd thinness of the "family size" boxes of frosted mini wheats is another one.
They won't be able to stand upright in the next round of shrinking.
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.
You comment made me feel emotional too. I'm glad you're doing better now.
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.
If you are paying a restaurant to make your chef salads and chicken strips you have no reason to complain about price when you can easily make those for 1/4 the cost yourself with ingredients from a grocery store.
Sometimes a guy just wants to not have to cook and to just go eat some god damn chicken strips
Apparently even the simplest pleasures in life are luxuries now.
I've never been able to make a single salad for less than the price of a salad at a normal-priced resturaunt, ever. Sure I can make 10 salads for the price of one, but it's really hard to buy 1/4 a tomato, or 1/2 a head of lettuce from a grocery store.
"If you like eating at restaursnts once in a while, you deserve not to be able to afford to eat!"
Fuck off, prick.
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
Sounds like they might be pumping water into that shrimp. They do it for chicken breast and I think up to half the weight of the product can be water added or something ridiculous like that.
That's how they do, it's all water weight and then they freeze it. You end up paying more for their shitty shrimp than you would at a decent market.
I have a locally-run produce store close to me, and I've found even for things like the brand of packaged cookies they sell, there's a unique texture and crispness to them - it's made me a bit more aware of the quality standards that individual stores may have.
If I go there, I don't get my pick of 17 brands for common things like meat or milk, but I end up enjoying the one or two options they have.
Buy less. Use less. Reward good pricing with your money. Spouse stopped buying favorite frozen sausages months ago because they went from $5 to $12. The other day noticed they are "on sale" for $5.25. Bought 2 and will continue buying them until they go back up. I've also started buying a lot of things on sale in bulk that will store awhile, so I can just walk by the ridiculous pricing until the next sale drops it again.
Arizona Ice Tea the fucking OG.
Still 99 cents for a huge ass can.
Respect.
El busto coffee too
You have to stop buying them now. That's the only way the prices will ever stabilize.
The ever reducing diameter of wraps is the thing that gets me the most. Do they think we won't notice?! It's maddening. I want a big wrap.
You'd think with a wrap it'd be easier to just stuff it with cheap starch and keep it looking big and satisfying in the display case.
For that they just put all the filling in the middle, cut them in half and only display the cut side for stuffed looking cross section. Meanwhile half or more of the wrap is empty.
its literally impossible to make a burrito in Australia. every wrap is made for ants
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.
Everybody blaming shrinkflation and nobody mentioning how terribly low salmon stocks are right now.
Atlantic Salmon populations have been doing fine and have an LC conservation status. Most of the issues with other salmon are in the populations off of the US West Coast.
Alaska has been seeing their populations increase in large part due to government hatcheries and wildlife management.
Can someone please check on the salmon make sure they're ok?
This is the first I've heard of this. What's causing it?
Same reason for every animal resource: over exploitation of the resource, habitat destruction/pollution, and climate change. This isn't a recent thing, salmon stocks have been declining over the last 4 decades. The response to this decline of course has been to continue extracting the same amount year over year.
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.
They also print the weight and number of pieces on the package, which they had to update. Since the packaging is otherwise identical, shoppers will buy it without reading the weight of number of pieces because it looks exactly like the old package.
Obviously, No Frills wanted to keep the price at $10, so they reduced the amount of fish in the package. That's shrinkflation. If the goal were to keep customers informed of the change, they would have made more noticeable change to the package.
Will at least all our problems of overweight, diabetes and clogged arteries be solved in a few years? Or will most of us be dead by that time? I fear the latter...
Unfortunately, buying ultraprocessed foods is cheaper than buying healthy food. So I'd say it will only make the problem worse.
The lucky ones will be dead. I don't expect that surviving the collapse is going to be a desirable option.
Cheap food is usually less healthy but if you talk about people staving a little from time to time it seems realistic that many might get slimmer, not the healthy way to do it but I guess some could end up healthier
My guy.
Losing weight by starving does not lead to a healthier person. What you get is a malnourished person.
Thinner people does not equal healthier people. These two factors need to be considered separately. Of course, the grossly obese tend to be less healthy, but even those in a "healthy" weight range, can have a large number of health-related problems, both with their diet and with their exercise and otherwise.
Well, this specifically being smoked wild salmon, it's not really problematic in that health sense (farmed salmon, on the other hand, has way much more fat and because of what it's fed, that's not even the good fat with lots of Omega-3) except perhaps any slightly hgher cancer risks associated with the smoking process (also it depends on any kind of chemicals added to accelerate the "smoking" - you can actually add "smoked flavour" - and preservatives).
The cause of obesity usually isn't the size of a pack of salmon.
Is this near the sign that says “Always $10”? :\
lol
"our research shows customers want more manageable and convenient portion siz-"
THE FUCK WE DO
In restaurants... not the fucking store!
I rarely get fast food but I've gone recently and I was shocked when I ordered a burger and got what would've been the junior version just a few years prior. Makes me wonder how tiny the junior version is nowadays.
It's like ordering a Big Mac and getting a cheese burger
A Big Mac where I am is basically just a cheeseburger with lettuce, more bread and different sauce. The circumference is exactly the same and it's using the same patties too.
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.
That's why you pass laws making this shit illegal. It clearly isn't going to regulate itself as we've seen and people are already being pushed past the point of no return.
What would the regulation be though? "you can't make your products smaller"?
What about "you have to add a sticker saying now with 30% less" for a year any time you change the size? Then maybe something about making different product lines visually distinct so they can't sneak it past
I'm not sure how you'd fix the problem, but at least we could make the shrinkflation more obvious to buyers
Or a 11% increase in price overall. Meanwhile inflation is at 6-7%?
Over what time period, though? We'd need to know when the 255g for $10 price was introduced. If the price and weight have been unchanged for a few years, this could even be below the rate of inflation.
Absolutely agree with you.
It's anecdotal, but I think this product was only introduced a little over a year ago in the supermarket that I shop. I don't remember seeing this $10 "value pack" prior to this, and I pick one up usually every 4-5weeks consistently.
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.
The cost increase is one thing, like you said there may be valid reasons why pricing for these particilar salmons increased more than inflation did. The disgusting part here is in my opinion the sneaky way its done: by shrinking the package you are (again in my opinion) lying to the consumer by leading them to believe you are paying the same as you were before, as the package looks mostly the same.
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
We tried that recently and I was disappointed. For the price I could just buy my own chicken and cook it and have it for a week.
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. :/
2 for the price of 3 is a whopping FIFTY% increase my dude, no frills feeling a lot more like Loblaws atm
I guess we're all going vegan at this point
Look closer. It went from 255g to 200g.
My bad thanks
going vegan at this point
Eating vegan is even more expensive. Source: sample of 1 (me)
If you want to save money, go fruitarian. /s
every day I think breatharians are a little less stupid
Why would it be? I can get tofu and beans cheaper than even the subsidized rates of meat and cheese. If you buy processed vegan products, perhaps.
Highway robbery.
I’d have more sympathy if this was something like peanut butter or eggs instead of smoked wild salmon.
Bidenomics at work
This is the cost of war.
This is the result of company greed
Literally just copy pasting this places now because so many people are still claiming greedflation is a thing. Not trying to spam but links to comments don't seem to work, and as a literal economist who works on inflation I'm tired of reading political talking points disguised as economic analysis.
I think everyone should probably listen to this great report from NPR that dissects this issue. The Tl;dr: is greedflation is not really a real thing.
The deeper answer to your question of, "can one party increase prices in a market?" is sort of basic economics, and the answer is, "Usually, no." In a competitive market, the answer is no. In a monopolistic market (meaning one company controls most of the market, think like Google with browsers) with no government oversight, the answer is yes. Things get complicated when you add in government regulation or oligopolistic markets (markets where only a few players control the market). In those cases, it depends on how strong government regulations on price-gouging are and any anti-monopoly or anti-anticompetitive practice laws are, and also depends on how oligopolists behave. Sometimes, particularly in industries with few big players, the big players will make the same decisions independently. If they do this cooperating it will usually violate antitrust laws, but if they both decide they'll be better off say, not paying workers as much, or charging super high markups, them that can happen. A lot of economic research shows that kind of "tacit collusion" happens in real life, like in the oil and gas industries. But other times oligopolies will behave very competitively, only uniting through lobbyist trade groups if at all (think Microsoft and Amazon in cloud software).
So that's the facts, but here's my economic musing: The reason it feels like greedflation is a thing is a combination of factors:
If you mean Ru vs Ukraine, the for-profit cost gouging for groceries disguised as 'inflation' began prior to that.