House of Eratosthenes

You ever notice when people don’t put a lot of thought into something, they end up exaggerating their importance — and because they exaggerate their own sense of importance, paradoxically, they end up envisioning themselves as a bunch of lab rats?

That probably needs clarification. I’ll explain. Start with this article about shrinking food packages…

With fuel and delivery costs rising, food manufacturers are faced with raising their prices or giving you less, and it seems that less is the growing trend.

To Dean Smith, the two containers of Breyers ice cream looked exactly the same at his supermarket in Evansville, Ind. Then he looked closely and figured out that the old package was 1¾ quarts, while the new package was just 1½ quarts.

“You can’t tell at all,” Smith said.

But the article isn’t about ice cream. It discusses cereal, cheese discs, coffee, sausage rolls, kitchen bags…on and on. Each of them charging the same price, or more, for smaller packages.

But [Consumer Reports editor Tod] Marks said the practice was just a way to hike prices under the radar of consumers.

“It’s a shell game, call it what you will,” Marks said in an interview on NBC’s TODAY. “In these tough economic times … the worst thing that can happen for a manufacturer at this point is to raise prices. So they use this sneaky tactic of giving you less and charging you more.”

And consumers do notice.

“When you find out you’re paying more but getting less, you’re left to believe somebody is doing something wrong,” Randy Compton said on a recent shopping trip to an Apple Market in Mobile, Ala.

Okay, let’s just explore a bunny trail for a second: This complaint is going to resonate with a lot of people, who will then go on to complain how embarrassed they are in “the eyes of the rest of the world” over what huge guts and butts Americans have. And our nation is fat. And it’s true that charging more for less food is a covert way to diminish our lifestyles…but to be sincere about it, you need to put some real passion into complaining about one of those, or the other. You can’t have both.

But the primary thrust of my point here, is about the lab rats. Why do we have to imagine there’s always a sinister conspiracy. “Hah! We’ll put thirteen ounces in this ‘one pound’ package of coffee, and we’ll FOOL OUR CUSTOMERS! Muhahahahahah…!!” (Pause to twirl the tip of your bad guy mustache with your fingers.)

The truth is, this is the way competition works — the consumer is not so important as to justify such sadistic motives. And I would expect a Consumer Reports senior editor to catch on to this. If you’re charging 8.99 for a pound of coffee and your competition is charging 8.99 for a pound of coffee, and then the price of coffee goes up because the price of diesel fuel is over 5.40 a gallon, and your competition starts selling 13.5 -ounce “one pound bags” so he can keep charging 8.99…what’re you gonna do?

1. Take a loss
2. Sell your own 13.5 oz bags for 8.99
3. Keep the bags at one pound and sell them for 10.99

You don’t have to have a degree in economics or in marketing to understand options 1 and 3 are suicide.

This is nothing but economic ignorance. People had the thought in their heads that oil could go up to $150 a barrel, and the price of Nutter Butter Bars would stay exactly where it is. Well, they thought wrong. They got an education.

I do think it’s a good economic alert to sound for the retail consumer. But this is something you learn when you move out of the house and do your own laundry. All ketchup doesn’t come in 32 ounce bottles. But if you’re concerned about it, you can just read a couple numbers on the container of whatever-it-is you’re buying, and skip the economic-class-warfare Pravda propaganda articles in glossy magazines, masquerading as shopping tips.

Want a bigger jar of strawberry jam for your four bucks?

Drill here, drill now!

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The Food Shrink RayThursday, July 10th, 2008

The Food Shrink Ray
Thursday, July 10th, 2008