“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

All.The.Time.

that Amazing Neutrogena conditioner, which was really good and lasted a year? Gone: if it lasts a year, its too good.

that original low-sugar chex? gone. we invented three new flavours.

that jam? gone. butter? gone. that cut of meat? gone. those pens? I mean pentel pens. How can pentel can an entire line of really good, fine writer ballpens? Gone. Sorry dude, it was you and your partner, thats IT. we checked inventory, we were shipping the last box to your category killer store two years before we canned it. It was you and some wierd hobo in Chiba were the last ones buying.

Wilkinson Sword made 30cl shaving foam cans, mostly supplied to the airline business for Business class passengers. Gone. That was the good stuff. I have to scrabble around for a Nivea gel in the same form factor, its hard to find.

My partner and I feel like the harbinger of doom for products a lot, we have dreamed of renting ourselves out to the highest bidder, to go and buy competitor product. We even called ourselves this before I read the term. We joked about being the kiss of death in shops, and then it became un-funny to the point we're scared to tell shopkeepers how much we like products sometimes.

(for the ones we want, we'd buy a LOT. That neutrogena shampoo is $40 a bottle now in the ebay hoarder bins. Neutrogena triple moisture daily deep conditioner. It used to be like $7. I have two bottles coming via a reseller, thats another year before we have to find a different conditioner.)

Grape Nuts. They're next. Trust me, Post is going to be reading the interwebs and my supplies of Grape Nuts will dry up.

Wierdly, we are high income, we are not buying dead real estate and out voting useless candidates (Green, Labor, our candidates do very well). So I think the article has over-compensated somehow.

Maybe we're up market Harbingers of Doom. Bespoke. Artisanal.

I'm pretty happy to just continue with the old.

But Heinz roast garlic deli mayo, you will be missed. And freschetta pizza, and eatemans carrot cake, and pop with sugar in, and small phones with decent battery life.

Isn't this kind of expected? Companies will give out coupons for products that don't sell so well. The higher the coupon value, the more desperate the company to get rid of this stock.

So if these households like to coupon a lot, that means they accept less than ideal market fit for a price reduction.