“LESS IS MORE” IS STILL LESS
I like fresh Florida orange juice. The kind that comes from Mexico where the oranges are grown, then get shipped by truck, along with hidden illegal immigrants, to California where they are boxed and sent to a warehouse in Idaho (the oranges, not the immigrants, the immigrants go on to North Carolina). At that point the oranges are distributed to a processing plant in Georgia and turned into juice. They add fake calcium, fake pulp and fake vitamin C, then put it into containers labeled “fresh, not from concentrate” to be sent all over the country. Just to keep it genuine the delivery trucks actually drive over the Florida border for a few miles so they can legitimately claim it’s “Real Florida Orange Juice.”
But the production of orange juice is only part of the story here. The real story is how our orange juice cartons (and other food and consumer products) have been downsized. I used to get eight, eight-ounce glasses of juice from one carton. And now I can only get 7.375 glasses of juice from the same carton. I discovered that one sleepy morning when I only had a third of a glass of juice to wake up with. The carton looked identical to what I’d been buying right along but for one small thing. This one was 59-ounces. The old one was 64. I was getting cheated out of five ounces of juice but the price was exactly the same as the 64-ounce container.
Well, if they can downsize jobs I guess they can downsize our products as well. These are difficult times. So I did some research and found this is a common issue with a lot of household goods and packaged foods these days. Apparently there really is a recession going on and higher costs are being passed off to consumers through hidden gimmicks like downsized products. Rather than raise prices and look bad, companies are trying to fool us and disguise the higher prices by giving us less. Imagine if we adopted that practice at work. “Sorry boss, but my gas prices went up today so I’m only giving you 7.375 hours of work to compensate.”
I started to poke into all this downsizing and found some amazing things. A big brand name meat packager now sells a pound of bacon in 12-oz packages. Who is getting the missing 4 ounces? Since many of our jobs were sent to India, is it possible the missing goods are being sent there too? Is this some kind of Peace Corps plot to secretly feed the third world without Congressional approval of foreign aid funds? Or perhaps SPECTRE is building a huge stockpile of surplus food and goods and will one day despoil the rest of the planet. Perhaps we need James Bond to look into this. The only other possible suspect is Sarah Palin. Her name pops up in a lot of places these days.
More likely it’s just that the big corporations are up to their old tricks of squeezing extra pennies out of every product sale. Besides orange juice and bacon, other products that are shrinking include: dish detergent, bath soap, paper towels, ice cream, canned fish and hot dogs. Hot dogs? How un-American is that? Frozen foods are shrinking as are many canned and dry boxed foods. If you use packaged foods your mealtime consists of anywhere from 9% to 26% less on your plate than before. Yet the prices of these items have not gone down, and in some cases they have even gone up.
But the most insidious, awful, heinous, low-down dirty stinking rotten shrinkage plot of all is with toilet paper. For years the paper companies have been advertising bigger, thicker, fluffier, longer lasting (I have yet to figure out how that’s a good thing), more sheets per role and so on. They know people are watching and squeezing the Charmin, so to get away with this incredible shrinkage they don’t always shorten the roles, they narrow the size of the rolls of paper so they don’t even fit the holders anymore. Whereas a standard sheet of paper was once a square 4.5 by 4.5 inches, it is now more like 4.5 by 4.0 inches wide. Not only is that not a square, but it’s also makes the paper itself more difficult to handle. We will not elaborate beyond that.
Consumer publications recommend that to fight back you can change brands, compare unit prices, switch to store brands, buy in bulk or just stock up when there are sales. That all sounds like good advice, but it’s time for consumers to really fight back. Isn’t it time we let the consumer brands companies know that we’re not stupid and we won’t take it anymore? We think a small thermonuclear device might bring more attention to the problem than a boycott, but of course even suggesting such a thing in this day and age might get us in big trouble with Homebrand Secur…..
OFFICIAL NOTICE:
THIS BLOG IS HEREBY SUSPENDED UNDER ORDERS OF HOMEBRAND SECURITY. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE STRIP SEARCHED AND HAVE US TOUCH YOUR JUNK WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU VISIT WEB SITES WITH QUALITY INFORMATION AND COUPONS, INCLUDING TROPICANA, HORMEL, KRAFT OR THE NEW SOYLENT FOOD PRODUCTS WEB SITE. HAVE A NICE DAY.
Notice: Consumer Reports Magazine just reported that the practice of downsizing product packaging while sustaining prices has been prevalent during the recession, with actual shrinkage running as high as 20% for the same original prices. The worst offenders on their current list are Ivory Dish Soap and Classico Pesto. Another active consumer publication is an online blog called Mouse Print, which reports that Taco Bell is fighting a class action suit charging that the beef in their beef taco is only 36% beef with the rest being “filler.” Good luck on your next trip to the supermarket. You’re going to need it.
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