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

theguardian.com

491–500 of 535 posts

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

#491
post #442

Of course the supermarket also does shrinkflation but I bet they never put the stickers there. > Consumer groups say “shrinkflation” is a widespread practice, which supermarkets like Carrefour are also guilty of in their private label products.

Most supermarkets in France operate at low single digit net margin on most products. If something goes up 20% it's very rarely on them

How is number of digits in their margin of any relevance? They post record profits with these tiny margins: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/carrefour-p...

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

#493
"We always comply with the labelling laws and regulations requiring objective information about how much product is in the package, including a net weight statement, a serving size, and a servings-per-container statement.

"Consumers can use this information to make accurate and informed purchasing decisions about the amount of product they are buying."

Only if I can remember from one purchase to the next what the price per gram of a specific bar of Lindt chocolate is.

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

#494
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ease of access is largely irrelevant when people need to eat either way so they can just make larger portions, eat a few extra chips when snacking etc. Don’t get me wrong obesity does relate to the overall abundance of calories, my point is that singling out soda or candy isn’t going to do much by itself.

There are direct observations of the link between workplace soda availability and waist circumference. You can wave these away as "not long term" I guess, but it's the best evidence available. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31657840/

The fact they didn’t mention a weight reduction or BMI changes suggests they didn’t observe any changes in weight / BMI.

I’ve looked into this a while ago and while consumption falls no studies showed a change in weight from soda bans. Unless you have something more recent?

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

#496
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish changes like this would also trigger a change in the barcode, that fundamentally by law a new unit size of the same product would be given a new number and that number would be on the receipt. If the number was tokenized like a VIN with sub strings representing volume that could be another way to catch this where the information is tied to data text rather than the physical product whose visuals can deceive wh…

Are people really going to OCR their receipts for years, hoping to catch an instance of "shrinkflation"?

Probably not but it would enable that sort of analysis should anyone find a way to easily automate that process someday. It’s one mechanism for feedback that probably not everyone has to do but a few could and their efforts would benefit the wider consumer base I’d imagine. If someone posted that raw data and analysis publicly that would be a website I’d visit from time to time.

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

#498

"We always comply with the labelling laws and regulations requiring objective information about how much product is in the package, including a net weight statement, a serving size, and a servings-per-container statement. "Consumers can use this information to make accurate and informed purchasing decisions about the amount of product they are buying." Only if I can remember from one purchase to the next what the pri…

Contrary to the US where you can commonly see 2 bottles of milk sitting next to one another with a price per oz and a price per gallon, in France there is a relatively good uniformity for prices per x. Unless you haven't had the experience yet, you'd know that it makes shopping and product comparison extremely easy, whatever the type of product you're buying.

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

#500
post #497

In France near every price also small LCD display that show price for kilogram or liter. Which also help to fight with companies that like to create idiotic packages.

I think that's European law

Yeah, I think it's the law in many countries now.
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