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%?
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.
It's not the supplier "bleeding them" the supplier has the exact same problem the restaurant has, inflation, if they don't raise the prices they go bankrupt. It's a vicious cycle of everyone raising prices not to go bankrupt which causes everyone else to do the same.
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?!
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:
255g now 200g
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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. :/
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:
Inflation was very real, and very salient.
Corporations (as mentioned in the NPR piece) crowed about their "record profits" in the short term, and also mention them when they are absolute record profits, not just record profit margins (something not mentioned but very real - a company can make twice as much money but also have spent twice as much, making way "more" money but with identical margins)
In the US at least, we are seeing the highest numbers of industry consolidation and monopolies/oligopolies since the Gilded Age, so it feels like companies should be able to raise their prices if they want to.
Media coverage and online spaces have become extremely polarized, so "corporations bad" is a very easy refrain to find if you're watching or reading anything remotely left-wing, and it has been parroted by many democratic politicians as well, because it scores cheap and easy political points (also, and this is just my opinion, it helps vilify corps more in the public eye to help get more support for better antitrust legislation and enforcement, the actual end goal. I don't think senators like Bernie Sanders don't actually understand what's going on with profit margins, I think they're using it to generate political will, but that may be my own bias creeping in).