See what I mean? Forced by the government to offer information on their packaging that is supposed to make it easier for consumers, they went into hyper-drive and put on too much info.
Here's a story about some of the ways grocery stores display products to make you spend more money.
Then there's the incredible shrinking container. Tuna dropped a half ounce or more with a price increase to boot. Less product for more money is much better in their eyes than a big old price increase. They all do it. The products are marked correctly, but it still seems like downright cheating.
And sometimes products simply disapear. For years I've used Mentadent toothpaste. I came across it in a friends house and adopted it my own brand fifteen years or more ago. Now you can't find it anywhere. Shouldn't they be required to have a dignified service of some kind to say goodby when they kill off a product? Should I ask the milk people to put it on the side of their containers under a "MISSING" headline?
And then what do we do when they kill off the milk product?
Oh, and while I'm at it. Why are there ten franks in a package but....oh heck, let's leave that for another post.
The coffee people did this a long time ago......I still think of it as a pound of coffee but my current package list the weight as ten ounces. The dishwashing detergent I use redesigned the shape of the bottle so that it dosen't look any smaller, although it sells for considerably more than it sold for two years ago.
ReplyDeleteWell... it's not as if our neighbors' Saturn, Oldsmobile, Hummer and Pontiac automobiles are going out of business!
ReplyDeleteWait a minute...
Wrong analogy - or is it?
Corporate greed is to account for much of about what you write. And, it's not confined to your missing Mentadent toothpaste, smaller tuna cans (I've not seen it yet), coffee, bacon or other product.
So-called "inflationary pressures" are greater than climatic events (bad weather or harvests for farmers), or strikes from laborers (whom often end up getting the shaft anyway).
"Inflationary pressures" are a euphemism for "let's see how much more profit we can make."
Unfortunately, the profits are going to corporate executives, and their corporate stockholders. That's true even with Wal-Mart, the "We buy Chinese, so you have to" people out of Bentonville, China... er, Arkansas.
No one begrudges a merchant for making a fair, decent or healthy profit.
Yet even when profit margins are slightly eroded by events over which we have no or little control, such accounting-for is taken into consideration by the pencil-necked-geeks-wearing-little-green-visors.
Remember "Scrooge," Charles Dickens' protagonist in his era-accurate novel "A Christmas Carol"?
Perhaps the only difference between Scrooge and the modern CEO is the "living large" that they do.
Other'n that... no difference - same selfishly corrupted principle, different era.
They make more... why can't others?
Historically, the difference between the average CEO's compensation and the average employee