I used to be able to look at the product, decide if I liked the look of it, checked the date and bought it.
Now I'm going to have to read all the label for all the details. Like mixed standards on the same shelves.
I thought control was higher standards, not the choice of lower standards. And no doubt the lower prices will force our existing standards down to match.
Progress. Advancing backwards. And thinking its great.
Across the supermarket shelves are examples of retailers and manufacturers shaving contents and dialling down expensive ingredients and, it seems, hoping we don’t notice. Shrinkflation – where pack sizes are reduced and prices stay the same, or even go up, and skimpflation – where recipes are reformulated and expensive ingredients cut down – are common [and] to make matters worse, only part of this is captured by the official inflation figures. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) takes into account pack size changes. So when it says that the cost of butter has fallen, that isn’t because you now get 200g rather than 250g – the price really has gone down.
When the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority examined
grocery price inflation last year, it raised concerns about consumers’ ability to compare prices if pack sizes are changing. It said that clear and consistent unit pricing – when, for example, a price per gram is displayed – could help with comparisons as the unit price would rise with shrinkflation. However, it acknowledged “it may not be sufficient as [the] consumer generally will not know what the previous unit price was”. On what it referred to as “scrimpflation”, it suggested consumers would vote with their feet if quality was reduced too much.
It doesn’t have to be like this. In France,
Carrefour put up signs warning customers of examples of shrinkflation and ministers there and in Germany are reportedly considering ways to address the problem. In South Korea,
new laws will oblige manufacturers to make it clear when a product size has been reduced.
In the UK, packaging rules insist that information is accurate and consumers are not misled. This means manufacturers have to change the packet when they make any of these changes. So why not force them to highlight the difference when they make that change?
Hilary Osborne@the Garundia