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

theguardian.com

361–370 of 535 posts

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

#361
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it doesn't have a minimum wage. There's nothing to hide here. Just look at the median wage in both places. Or in this case, the lowest 10% wage. I prefer Australia's wage board system, but I think nobody knows how it works because they're Australian so they've given stupid names to everything. Try and guess what "award" and "casual loading" mean.

It doesn’t have a de jure minimum wage, but it does have a de facto one, and just saying it doesn’t hides the subtlety of that.

Plenty of Danes make less than that. Stages at Noma used to make absolutely no money at all.

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 20 different burger restaurants within 10 miles of me. Some are chains, some are local. Some use major beef suppliers, some use local organic ones. All of their prices have gone way up. There is no collusion here and this has jack shit to do with mergers. If those were the causes, inflation would have been a crisis 10 years ago.

The only collusion is the default one: profit at all costs. Everyone raises prices to increase profits, increasing inflation, that increases prices further... I don't understand why people are so happy to blame governments and treat companies, in which profit is their raison d'être, as if they're only "reacting to the government". Of course both are to blame, but let's stop pretending companies are victims while reco…

If this is true, why are inflationary periods relatively rare?

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure you're aware of this, but price increases only require increased spending from customers if transaction volume is held constant Reduced demand reduces prices. It's the Law of Supply & Demand at work. The Law is always at work, even money is subjected to it. Increase the supply of money, and the value of a dollar drops accordingly. We see this effect as inflation. In physics, we know that momentum is conser…

> Reduced demand reduces prices. It's the Law of Supply & Demand at work. You have to be careful when asserting this though, because demand does not mean what most people think it means. In particular, it does not refer to the number of people demanding a good, nor does it refer to a volume of goods purchased. A declining sales volume occurring together with rising prices does not violate the law of supply and demand…

Rising prices reduce demand. But there are competitors. That's why a company cannot just raise prices.

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

#364
post #131
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…

Wouldn't Texas and their electric infrastructure and pricing be that defines the reality of price floating while showing people in power are dumb? As showing by the lack of regulation to weather treat your power infrastructure? So cold that the water pumps to cool nuclear power plants freeze? So cold that the natural gas lines freeze? So low in quality that they cannot be connect to the national electric infrastructure to allow for non-price gouging use during national disasters, hot or cold?

Shouldn't it be humanity that takes offense in a natural disaster instead of financial exploitation?

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reduced demand reduces prices. It's the Law of Supply & Demand at work. You have to be careful when asserting this though, because demand does not mean what most people think it means. In particular, it does not refer to the number of people demanding a good, nor does it refer to a volume of goods purchased. A declining sales volume occurring together with rising prices does not violate the law of supply and demand…

Rising prices reduce demand. But there are competitors. That's why a company cannot just raise prices.

Yes, rising prices reduce demand. But rising volumes also create economies of scale and allow low prices. There's a delicate balance and sometimes an equilibrium of large volume, low price can transition to a new equilibrium of low volume, high price, or vise-versa. For example, if you are a software company and you sell software to a small group of professionals, like a CAD program, your price is probably around $1000 ~ $5000 per seat, per year. And competition will not lower it, because your competitors face the same economic situation you do: it's a niche product, you have to amortize a high development cost over a small number of customers, and those customers have money and are willing to pay.

However, there is also a stable equilibrium for a company to turn a similar profit shipping software of equal quality to a very large number of people for a very low price. Something like a spreadsheet or word-processing software. Now your software is cheap, or supported by ad revenue, and yet you can still remain highly profitable. If, however, your userbase started to shrink for whatever reason, you might have to charge the remaining users a large amount. Most will leave, but a few of those users may derive a lot of value from your software and are willing to pay, and you end up with the same economics as the CAD developer.

Software is of course an extreme example, where the marginal cost of production is approximately zero, but most industries outside of resource extraction have declining marginal costs with scale. That's why you can end up with high-quality cheap components (like cameras, etc) that are used in smartphones, where they have high-volume production, and very expensive specialty cameras for eg. microscopes, even though the specialty camera required much less investment of R&D to produce. It can only be sold at a high price because there is not enough demand to reach economies of scale that would allow a lower price.

So if for whatever reason, money was sucked out of the economy and the average person suddenly became very poor and could not afford a smartphone, it's possible that smartphone companies would compete hard to keep those customers and drop their prices. But if that doesn't make for a sustainable business, the smartphone makers have to drop production to sell only to a few wealthy buyers, the remaining phones will get much more expensive, because their components will be made in expensive fabs at smaller volumes. The total revenue will be lower, the GDP would be lower, but the average price of goods can still be higher. Especially when there's a large wealth disparity to make that high-price low-volume equilibrium stable.

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was legislation in place that sets legal standard sizes; for one, it would allow for more uniform packaging, allowing reuse between brands and reducing trash. It would be more predictable box / pallet sizes, reducing transport costs. And it would give consumers more security, even with the mandatory price per liter / kilo notices which are often hard to read. One example of shrinkflation / cost fuckery h…

As sibling comment said, I think this is bound to cause unintended side-effects. I think it would be simpler to require per-unit pricing alongside overall cost, and regulate that amount. Nothing more frustrating than seeing a per ml or oz cost on one item and a per-count cost on one right next to it.

At my Kroger, almost half the times I try to compare unit price bergen two products, the units are different (e.g. $/oz or $/lb or $/g). And these are always products right next to each other on the shelf.

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

#367
post #72
post #62

I don’t know what the correct term is in English but in my country, “comparative pricing” is mandatory, so when you’re buying coffee for example there’s a secondary price listed that tells you what the cost is per kilogram or whatever other unit makes sense. For me this already solves the problem, because what I really care about isn’t whether I get 500g or 400g of coffee, I care about the real price compared to the…

You do miss though, those situations where every supplier took advantage of inflation to stack extra margin on. Seeing that diff to the last price is helpful.

This either means that they have a cartel (which is illegal), or they effectively had no choice for some reason or another. ("Inflation" is such a nebulous concept...)

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rising prices reduce demand. But there are competitors. That's why a company cannot just raise prices.

Yes, rising prices reduce demand. But rising volumes also create economies of scale and allow low prices. There's a delicate balance and sometimes an equilibrium of large volume, low price can transition to a new equilibrium of low volume, high price, or vise-versa. For example, if you are a software company and you sell software to a small group of professionals, like a CAD program, your price is probably around $10…

Inflation isn't a price increase in one item. It's a price increase across the economy, including wages.

Your theory of inflation does not explain why it isn't continuous, and tends to follow periods of enormous deficit spending. That's a common factor to inflationary episodes, not some industry figuring out how to gouge.

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

#369
post #3

> Guigoz infant formula produced by Nestlé went from 900 grams (31.75 oz) to 830 grams, while Unilever’s Viennetta ice-cream cake shrank to 320 grams from 350 grams. Wish I could be surprised at Nestle doing the most evil thing possible, but here we are.

Every brand is doing this

Is every brand a baby formula brand?

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

#370
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every brand is doing this

On Reddit, someone said that even Carrefour is doing this with their own labeled products. Seems like just a negotiation tactic against their suppliers versus doing something pro-consumer.

If it quacks like a duck
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