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Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
211–220 of 535 posts
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#212Earlier 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)
This isn't my experience, so I went looking and found this:
> Uniform Unit Pricing Regulations apply only when stores voluntarily provide unit pricing information. The unit of measure chosen must be consistent across like items within the category.
So if a store offers unit pricing it must be consistent within a category.
https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laws-and-regulations/us-retail-...
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#213Chocolate bars are most notorious for this. Someone needs to do a 10 years ago comparison and there's a massive difference. These days, chocolate bars are all bite sized.
The rise of robust middle classes in Asia have also put a squeeze on the world's chocolate supply in the last decade or two. These days in the US, it's hard to even discern the cocoa in most "chocolate" bars.
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#214Earlier 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.
From my perspective, you're saying the same thing as the parent: both prices and margins have gone up. Then you're stating the definition of inflation. Parent's comment was (implicitly) about 50% of this inflation being avoidable and thus surprising, because margins didn't necessarily have to go up to keep business going. It was just a seized opportunity. If you can show that margins unavoidably always go up during i…
Margins almost always increase anyway.
I'm not sure anybody fully understands the mechanism (for the most studied phenomenon of economics, inflation is quite badly understood), but that doesn't change the fact.
Anyway, if you run the Keynes model for macroeconomics, the average margin increases very naturally when the money supply increases. It increases even more if the new money is injected in the economy by well distributed government spending. Still, that's one model we have that kinda works, but it's so full of problems that you can't take its predictions for granted.
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#215It seems somewhat out of linguistic character for them to use the English-"shrink"-based portmanteau, but hopefully there's a universal commonality (especially coupled with the hashtag format) that makes this move more effective.
The -tion ending is theirs anyway, and they love certain types of English words. They especially love -ing endings and will stick them on when it wouldn’t make sense in English. Ever notice the French for shampoo on also-sold-in-Canada shampoo bottles in the US? Shampooing. As a noun. And that’s not some Quebecois thing, it’s French French. Maybe they also like the “sh-“, and that made “shrinkflation” appealing. They…
Meanwhile, you have smoking and brushing, which are not at all the same as what they are in English.
(Tuxedo and blow dry, respectively.)
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Australia we seem to be having high inflation of food, which the main supermarkets (a duopoly) are blaming on the cost of goods. Meanwhile, they've both reported their highest ever company profits. :( So, clearly they're full of shit about the cost of goods being the cause rather than their own price gouging.
Record profits in a period of inflation is not surprising. If the value of the Australian dollar halves, then a company doubling it's raw profit figures is really just staying maintaining the same profits in real value.
If the value of the Australian dollar halves, and a company manages to double its raw profit figures... doesn't that still sound like price gouging?
Why would their "maintaining the same profits in real value" be acceptable when no-one else in the end to end chain (producers, customers, etc) managed to in the situation.
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#217Earlier 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)
Sounds like a great opportunity for an AR app that can compute and overlay differences in your field of view. It would be cool to run this on the Apple Goggles. (I am not ready to see people walking around wearing those things in real life).
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kroger/HarrisTeeter too… It is definitely malice because they use every unit imaginable to avoid allowing you to compare within an item type (kg, lbs, oz, g, fl oz, “unit” (where unit = package))
Nothing that a law to stick to single unit can't fix!
Thinking about it a little more I bet it is very difficult to legally define a product type.
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#219For 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...
Do not buy into that narrative. This inflationary process has been mostly driven by monetary policy. Margin increases are the result of businesses trying to navigate an inflationary period. These margin increases are not resulting in increased profits across the board (there are some notable exceptions). For example, Carrefour's profits in 2022 were about the same as in 2019. [1] From the article you linked: "Profits…
Without a doubt monetary policy has fueled inflation, but do not ignore the policies of allowing corporate mergers for the last 40 years. Lack of competition reduces price elasticity, and the end game of every monopoly is to raise prices. We are living in a world of global monopsonies, and my expectation is to contine to pay this monopoly tax for years.
Worse, is it’s never been easier to collude. It used to be you had to pay a big consulting firm big money for them to tell you “current market rates” for many goods and services. Now you can just subscribe to same SaaS everyone in your industry uses and have it tell you how much to charge. This tends to help break out of a prisoner’s dilemma.
This was something I never quite anticipated. I used the intenet when it was young to help do price discovery and find better deals. Never occurred to me the end game was for companies to do it even better for pricing. Even after seeing thrift store pricing adjust due to seeing online prices on ebay, it didn’t occur to me the scale it would happen elsewhere.
Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
#220I really love it when stores put the per unit price on their labels (at least they do in California), i.e. $2 per ounce. It would be neat if they can also add a historical graph of those prices to the label.