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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

#301

Post by astrange »

effingwewt wrote: post #285
astrange wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages by definition also increase with inflation. (Inflation is a general increase in prices and wages are a price.) Though you can have both unemployment and inflation at once, called stagflation. Also in the US, the lowest 10% of real wages has grown significantly since 2020, lowering income inequality vs the middle class.

I'll need some citations on those numbers. In states like Texas minimum wage is still $7.25/hr and many places pay just that. How do you reconcile your numbers with that? Bills have outpaced wages to the point nearly a whole generation of young adults have given up on home ownership and have had to move back home. Mortgages are increasing in years and rates, even new cars have. Income inequality has never been higher…

> How do you reconcile your numbers with that?

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w310...

It doesn't matter what the minimum wage is though, it matters what people are actually paid. Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage and they're doing okay.

> Bills have outpaced wages to the point nearly a whole generation of young adults have given up on home ownership and have had to move back home.

Not true, and Texas is fairly affordable. (It's blue states that aren't because they all refuse to build homes.)

https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r...

> Mortgages are increasing in years and rates, even new cars have.

Rate increases theoretically don't affect the total price of a new mortgage because you can negotiate the sale price down to make up for it. Supply and demand is what controls the total price. Higher rates do reduce new construction though.

Cars got more expensive because they stopped making cheap new cars, which is bad, but it's not 100% of CPI any more than rent is.

> Income inequality has never been higher and you're seriously saying it's gotten better since the greatest wealth transfer in history?!

No, income (wage) inequality peaked in 2014 and has been flat since, then decreased since 2019.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inequality-might-be-going-down...

The real great wealth transfer in history was the 2020 CARES act giving a lot of money to the poor. We should do it again. (This is the one that a lot of people online like to say "we only got $600" about which is a straight up lie. It was up to $2400/month for an unemployed mother with children.)

The one that went up is wealth inequality, meaning value of unrealized assets like stock portfolios. But that's not nearly as real as cash. (Also, our top tech billionaires Gates/Bezos/Musk helped inequality out by losing half of their wealth by cheating on their wives or buying Twitter.)

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

#302

Post by vineyardmike »

enoch_r wrote: post #250
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...

This argument is completely incoherent. You can't study the cause of inflation by looking at the distributional effects of inflation. For example, in 2020 there was a huge increase in demand for used cars, and the price of used cars increased by ~40% within a few months. But people who sold used cars did not have their costs increase - they were, after all, selling an already completed product. The IMF would therefor…

> the increase in prices was because there were too many buyers and too few cars, not because the owners of used cars suddenly because significantly more greedy overnight.

No it’s literally greed. You can choose to not raise the price of your used car when you sell it. “Market price” is a hallucination that you can ignore. You’re not forced to go along with it. As you said, sellers of used cars didn’t have their cost increase, so what was the forcing function for price increases except greed?

Which brings me to corporate profits…

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

#303

Post by mrguyorama »

the_other wrote: post #75
mrguyorama wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about though, it absolutely is "sustainable", and businesses have been doing it at least a couple decades, so why would they stop? It makes the profit line go up, which is all that matters.

> It makes the profit line go up, which is all that matters. I think "all that matters" needs qualifying to "all that matters to some people".

It's all that matters to the people hiring CEOs and on their boards.

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

#304

Post by vineyardmike »

vasco wrote: post #131
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.

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 mak…

Yikes. If the people in power are really smart though they’ll protect their constituents against greedy opportunists and fund the water transportation at cost. Maybe even paid for by taxpayers.

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

#305

Post by tech-historian »

selimthegrim wrote: post #118
tech-historian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This phenomenon generally cracks me up, where you see random (to me) english phrases sprinkled throughout foreign languages. SNL leaned into this, in a skit with Pedro Pascal speaking spanish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkmlfHi9Ll4

The counterpart to this is of course https://youtu.be/nWMp_z7Jnxw

Brilliant! I hadn't seen that one, thank you!

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

#306

Post by darrylb42 »

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)

Or in Canada, BC. Things like meat can be priced in $/lb or $/100g in the same cabinet. Makes the mental math tricky and you can think something is cheap when it is not.

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

#307

Post by IngvarLynn »

2devnull wrote: post #117

Great idea but there’s a slippery slope problem. Report on shrinkflation packaging and companies will switch to other less transparent means (ie changing ingredients) and so this adds a bit of perverse incentive. I suppose companies already do the cost cutting, adding filler, etc… I’m a fan of just mandating price per ounce labels on everything. Stores could show current price per ounce and last year’s, no calling ou…

In my experience shrinkflated products already use inferior ingredients, so it's a very useful signal that should be boosted, not eliminated. So putting a warning is a good thing, but shaming is not.

To develop the idea further, most grocery shopping should move online, so I could trivially filter out products with shrinkflated packaging, containing palm oil, nestle brands, etc.

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

#308

Post by lesuorac »

WalterBright wrote: post #204
lesuorac wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is a disease not a virus. Inflation does nothing on its own; it does not have agency. It's just a description of a symptom (increase in price). Whether that set of symptoms (Disease) is caused by price gauging or labor price increases or resource prioritization is not known just from inflation. Although if you see that profits are way up then you know its not due to labor price increases as that company's r…

If inflation is 10% and profits go up 10%, most likely that's inflation's effect.

I don't think you get it yet.

If I pour water into a cup and the line says 100 ML there's 100 ML of water. That measurement of 100 ML is a descriptor of how much water that is.

Inflation is a descriptor of how much prices have increased.

If we measure the line a second time and it says 120 ML then the water level has increased (i.e. inflation occurred). But why inflation occurred is not know _just_ by measuring the water level.

If firms increase their prices by 10% then the firm is causing inflation (prices have increased). If said firm also gets a 10% increase in their profits then we people would say inflation is entirely driven by profits (although probably strictly inaccurate). However at no point does "inflation" cause something. Inflation is _just_ a measurement.

--

Sticking with the incorrect math, if your prices go up 10% and your profits go up 10% you are the cause of inflation.

If your suppliers increased their prices by 10% so you increased your prices 10% then your profit goes up 0% and if your suppliers profit went up 10% then they're the cause of inflation.

This second example is why people are getting upset. Companies are all complaining they need to raise prices "due to inflation" but since their profit margins are just getting better people are suspicious of how much of the price increase is dictated by their supplier's price increases versus greed (value pricing).

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

#309

Post by darrylb42 »

Cerium wrote: post #44
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.

Don't worry, in a few months they will make a package that says "Now with 20% more".

Now with 20% more**

** than a box with 20%less no change in package size required. This was on a thing of Oldspice antiperspirants.

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

#310

Post by JohnFen »

vasco wrote: post #131
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.

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 mak…

> For the affected people it makes sense because now they can drink water

Only the rich people. It does nothing for everyone else.

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