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Saturday, February 26, 2011

Hidden inflation and the incredible shrinking toilet paper roll.

 Not all TP is equal any more, even if you think you’re buying the same product.
Check out this clip:

This type of thing happened here after 2001 and I remember mentioning it to people. Its sad how a few years later its happening over there as well.
Its a neat trick because you feel you’re paying the same, but truth is you’re getting less product. Basically the price has gone up.
There are other ways in which the companies manage to increase the price by giving you less product:

1) Check the cans, they may be the same size but there may be less actual food. When buying tuna for example, they put more oil into it than before. Sometimes you open it and see that it´s only 3/4 full or less.
2) The shape of the bottle or container changes, more curvacious, those convex curves on the sides (also check the bottom) are ways of tricking the eye into thinking that the shape is about the same, but there’s really less volume.
3)For products that come sealed in bags and placed inside boxes like some cereals, the box may be the same, as well as the bag, but the net weight and content is less than before.

Sometimes they just lower the quality of the product without you knowing.
1)Adding more water into it. This happens a lot here with juices and milk. Do you check the actual orange juice content in your orange juice? In Argentina most brands have gone from 70%, to 50% and in some cases you buy “orange juice" with less than 30% of real orange juice. All this works nicely for the government as well, since they can claim that the price of milk or juice hasn’t gone up per gallon.
2)By adding more starch to food in general. Cookies dont taste as good as they did, chocolate seems to have less flavor. They are cheapening the quality of the food sold but keeping the same price. Sometimes they pull this by changing both the package and the name. “New Super cereal Plus! Much better than our old super cereal! more tasty!" Maybe they add a bit more flavoring or market it as having extra vitamin C, but it has less fiber or other ingredient that has gone up in price, or maybe they switched to a cheaper ingredient supplier.
For example, here’s an American Oreo (left) compared to an Argentine post economic collapse oreo (right). The Argentine oreo doesn’t taste nearly as good as the American one, and its smaller too!:

3) This same thing will be applied to products in general, from gasoline to cleaning products. Over the years, the ammunition produced locally has less and less powder in it. Soon it will barely leave the barrel! Just an example of how they cut costs, yet keep the same old price.

Take care folks, and don´t let them fool you!

FerFAL

9 comments:

carolyn said...

You're correct....how about the molded plastic juice bottles that have the bottom pushed way up inside with a tiny rim for the product, so it APPEARS to go all the way to the bottom...

Anonymous said...

All of those chocolate syrups now have mostly high fructose corn syrup and no flavor. Corn is destroying America, with diet making people fat with HF corn syrup and screwing the citizens financially with corn subsidies for ethanol to keep rich corn growers richer.

Steve

Anonymous said...

I just got back from the grocery store and was discussing this with my wife. We went to look for a well-known local brand of ice cream that always came in 2 quart containers. Only this time, the containers are now 1.5 quarts, but the price is higher! I noticed that Haagen-Daaz had previously done the same thing not too long ago, and now this other well-known brand sold in the Houston area has followed suit.

Anonymous said...

carolyn...old trick.
wine bottles do this.
it's called the 'punt'.
supposed to increase the
strength of the glass but
it decrease the 'apparent'
volume.

Anonymous said...

Not anything new. Been hapopening for years. Remeber a couple of years ago Coke tried to reduces it's buttle size to 1.5 leters but keep the same price?

And if not actual size shrinkage then using lower quality ingredients.

Or both.

Anonymous said...

The manufacturing companies have been gradually doing this for years. Potato chips are actually laughable, because when you open the large bag, the chips only fill up about the bottom 35-40%. The video here ends with the question "what can you do?" Only two things that you can do: 1) make more money, because your money buys you less and less. 2) Do intelligent comparison shopping and really look at the details. Get the best buy for the buck, because these companies are deliberately out to screw you.

Dan said...

Don't put all the blame on the companies; they are trying to run a business and make a profit (which pays the salaries of the workers). They can't keep making the same product because the price would go up at the rate of inflation, and no one would buy their product. If they talked to their competitors and all agreed that they all had to raise prices to keep quality and quantity consistent, the government would prosecute them for being a trust or cartel. Then also, you have the consumers who blame the companies without putting the blame where it mostly belongs: on the government that's causing the inflation in the first place! (Oh, and corporations are an invention of the government, too.)

I know most of the people here know all this, I just wanted to say it again to keep the focus on the real criminals!

Anonymous said...

A few more years of this and we'll get back to the normal sizes of packaging we had during the 50s.

For example, a bottle of Coke in the 50s used to be 6.5 ounces. Now, a regular size bottle is 12 ounces, and people regularly get 64 ounce bladder-busters of soda at the gas station for like a $1.50.

Americans could do with some smaller sized packages of potato chips and cookies and soda. We we pay extra for the food will be offset by lower healthcare costs from not being such fat f****s.

Darryll Anderson said...

there is a flaw in your inflation logic....if you cant afford as much food, then you dont need as much TP...right? negates the inflation costs!

same for gasoline, if you dont have a job then you dont need to drive as much so you dont need to buy as much gas...right...right....man i could work for the central banks....!