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Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

theguardian.com

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Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#131

Post by vasco »

NickM wrote: post #106
h1fra wrote: post #69

For those wondering if it's truly representative, it's estimated that 50% of the inflation in Europe is due to margin increase not bc of the inflation itself. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/06/26/europes-inf...

Supply constraints typically lead to higher prices and higher margins. The fact that the margins have gone up does not somehow imply that the higher prices are something other than inflation.

Temporarily and in a localized way, yes.

For example, if there's a natural disaster, and the people in power aren't dumb, they'll let prices float instead of putting caps in place, and everyone will be incentivised to rent big trucks full of water bottles and sell it for 20-50x the normal price. For the affected people it makes sense because now they can drink water, and if the prices were controlled nobody would make the drive. Eventually enough people do the drive or the disaster passes and prices normalize.

At the moment it's hard to explain what is happening but it might be more complex than just "nothing to see here". I've come to realize that reality is more nuanced than Milton Friedman made it out to be (and he did too later in life).

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#132

Post by solatic »

Buy items priced by bulk weight to begin with. Meat, vegetables, nuts, also items in standard packaging sizes like milk per liter or gallon. All this processed junk (with its non-standard package sizing) is bad for you anyway.

If someone will start packaging toothpaste in bulk liter sizes, I'll switch to that, and find some kind of more permanent dispenser to fill that looks better in my bathroom anyway.

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#133

Post by bearmode »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #100
badcppdev wrote: post #37

This is such a good idea. I know that everyone in the Western World is told that they eat too much but people need to be able to buy food and eat it. And if the same packaging this week has 90% of what it had last week then then consumers are going to suffer. In the UK many people rely on Food banks and parents skip meals to feed their children. Cutting the amount of food in a package in a manner that is not even vis…

This is a cynical move because, as the article mentions right at the top, this is just to apply pressure on suppliers before contracts renegotiations. Tesco in the Uk does not sort of stunt as well and for the same reasons. > In the UK many people rely on Food banks and parents skip meals to feed their children. A small minority, not 'many'...

3 million people used them between last year and this year. About 4.5% of the population. That's a lot of people.

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#134

Post by WalterBright »

My dad told me when he was a boy there was a chocolate bar called the "Nickle Bar" that sold for, you guessed it, a nickel. As inflation/deflation changed prices, the Nickle Bar remained costing a nickel, but the size of the bar changed.

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#135

Post by psychoslave »

eddtests wrote: post #123
NickM wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply constraints typically lead to higher prices and higher margins. The fact that the margins have gone up does not somehow imply that the higher prices are something other than inflation.

Why does it cause such higher margins?

Because the middle man typically see there an opportunity to extort more money?

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#136

Post by flir »

hedora wrote: post #94
BlueTemplar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can (and should!) check the (mandatory) price/mass or price/volume, but of course there are very smart people being paid a lot to design the packaging so that it's sufficiently compelling for you to still put a higher value on the product...

Expecting people to memorize the per-unit price of everything they buy and compare week to week is unrealistic. Also, at least in the US, the price/weight for the same type of item is often in different units. ($/oz for brand A; $/lb for brand B, etc)

Same in the UK, except 10g/100g/1000g so it's a bit easier to work out. Still an antipattern though.

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#137

Post by julienfr112 »

transcriptase wrote: post #35

It’s incredible to me that MBAs are still able to pitch “what if we made the product deceptively smaller but charged the same price?”, and don’t get thrown out a window. As if that’s a novel sustainable long-term strategy in CPG.

MBA people can also be shrinked : We only need 80% of you sales people, with chatgpt and co ...

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#138

Post by lukeschlather »

f6v wrote: post #14

Yeah but what’s the alternative? Things are expensive, you’ve got to eat. I have to purchase things even if it’s affected by shrinkflation.

A lot of the time shrinkflation makes me seriously look at buying ingredients directly. I can afford to pay extra but, like for example Field Roast recently reduced the size of their sausages from 4oz to 3.2oz each, which is like 300 vs 240 calories, which is enough that I like... can't eat a sausage anymore, it's not enough food. The whole point of having prepackaged food like that is that it's easy to portion out, once they reduce the size sufficiently that a single portion is no longer a portion it makes more sense to buy something else I will portion myself.

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#139

Post by Foobar8568 »

robjan wrote: post #98
charles_f wrote: post #8

This is great, shrinkflation is one of these disgusting practices that play on the human psyche to trick people. But also carrefour (and large retailers like them) are notorious for abusing their power when buying, and are a large part of the systemic problem. I don't know how much this is negotiating technique.

There's a general push in supermarkets to move consumers towards own-brand goods as the profit margin is higher. It wouldn't surprise me if this was a marketing tactic to push people in this direction.

And carrefour is among the worst offenders on this topic.

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#140

Post by Symbiote »

hedora wrote: post #94
BlueTemplar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can (and should!) check the (mandatory) price/mass or price/volume, but of course there are very smart people being paid a lot to design the packaging so that it's sufficiently compelling for you to still put a higher value on the product...

Expecting people to memorize the per-unit price of everything they buy and compare week to week is unrealistic. Also, at least in the US, the price/weight for the same type of item is often in different units. ($/oz for brand A; $/lb for brand B, etc)

The EU does have some rules about this [1], "The unit price shall refer to a quantity declared in accordance with national and Community provisions", but I've still seen similar products priced per 100g and a different brand priced per "item".

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...

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