47 Replies to “No One Will Notice”

    2. Best example. When the price of Wagon Wheels went from a nickel to a dime. The size of the product was reduced like the size of the coins.

      1. I remember that.
        That crap happened back in the bad ol’ 70’s.
        Wagon Wheels ain’t what they used to be.

  3. I noticed. And not just brand name products, but store brand products as well. The price never goes down though.

  4. Exactly the same thing happened in 2008 with food sizing. I recall orange juice concentrate losing about 15% and family packs of 6 containers disappearing then.
    Never to return.

    Cheddar used to be +900 gm, and is now 800 gm +/-

    1. Bacon certainly went up in price from a previous typical $3.99/lb to 6.99/lb, at least in my province. Johnson sausages went from $3.99 to $5.99/pkg of 375gms. I don’t eat bacon so no tears over that but I do like those sausages.

  8. Pandemic wiped out old inventory, made it easy to introduce ‘improvements’

    Some of my favorites

    Toilet paper and paper towel rolls got narrower when they reappeared on shelves

    Disinfecting cleaners and wipes that are nothing more than watered down peroxide or bleach or industrial cleaning solvent hand sanitizer sold for insane amounts

  9. Yes its a pandemic of short changing without a doubt.

    Our city residential garbage collection went to automated pick up from manual curbside.
    The powers that be touted that it would save $$ by not having employees booking time off for strained backs etc.

    So they brought in these big tandem garbage haulers with mechanical lift arms that are worth maybe just south of three quarter million apiece . The trucks are not really designed for this purpose and spend their days screaming out in 1st gear for another 75 feet to the next can. The maintenance on them must be astronomical I’m willing to bet.
    Then they redesign the city land fill… fence it off so no one can scrounge…put it on city hours with Sun/Mondays shut down; put in a weigh scale so you have to both wait in the line up and pay if you pack too much and to top it off, yes hire more city workers.

    Before all this gov’t brainstorming there were only 2 employees at the dump…now they have their own parking lot and about 5-6 vehicles there and 3-4 more employees than previously.

    Oh! And to top it off they cut back our curbside service from once a week to once every 2 weeks …but we are still paying the same $ for every week delivery as before.

    1. In the days before amalgamation, where I lived had full service trash and recycling pick up on Mondays and Thursday operated by a contracted company. then amalgamation came, and it changed to one day a week on Mondays for both recycling and trash, at the same cost on your taxes, but still provided by a private company. Then we got that commie nitwit Miller, who improved service by going to Garbage and Recycling pickup on alternate weeks. It was later improved again by moving the cost from the tax bill to the sanitation bill in the interests of fairness to the people who had the city worker provided service without the corresponding drop in property taxes.

      I’m not sure how much more government mandated improvements I can take.

  10. Shrinkflation is one thing but when the quality of anything is diminished I get tired of their scams and literally talk myself out of a re-purchase a second time. There are too many examples of that to itemize them all, but you get the picture.

    1. I have two examples of product degradation that shocked me at the time so I will never forget them. I imagine they are illustrative of the overall food/cosmetics industry. This has been going on for YEARS, because my examples are from at least 10 years ago.

      I was doing a spring cleaning at my house. In my pantry I noticed I had two ovaltine containers. The older one was way at the back, and I guess I just forgot I hadn’t finished it before I bought a new one. I studied the two containers and was shocked. The older Ovaltine was produced domestically, and contained all natural ingredients, skim milk powder, real whole egg, etc. The newer Ovaltine container had nothing in it that was natural, and was now being manufacted in an s-hole country. As I say, I was shocked. Later in the day, I was in my bathroom, continuing the spring clean. I noticed I also had Pears soap packages I had bought some time ago. Because of my earlier discovery with the Ovalitine, I was curious to compare the newer Pears with the older. Older Pears was manufacture in England, and had all-natural ingredients like essential cedar oil, etc. The new Pears was now coming in from an s-hole country, and was full of synthetic ingredients.

      Lately, the shrinkflation has been more in your face than ever. In some cases, the package size stays the same, but the contents are much less. In other cases the container is CONSIDERABLY smaller. This recent shrinkflation happened “almost suddenly” and coincided with the Covid, as others have noted.

      The bean counter inside me has also been keeping meticulous track of my grocery spending over the years. Some months are more expensive than others, because I don’t have to buy certain things every month. So I have computed a 15 month average of my monthly grocery expenditure and compare it from month to month. On average, my household grocery costs are going up 2% every month. I do NOT buy any processed food; I make pretty much everything from scratch the old fashioned way.

      I talked to my grocery store manager about the shrinkflation, reduced product quality, and price increases. He would only comment on the price increases. He didn’t admit prices were going up; he only said he looks at his monthly revenues and expenditures, and his store isn’t making any more profit than it ever did. He’s an older guy, so I reminded him of the 70s stagflation. I said I was sure he wasn’t making more profit, because he’s paying more for his products from the distributors, and just passing those costs on to his customers. Which is the only thing he can do if he wants to stay in business. He just stared at me and didn’t say anything.

      The bigger takeaway of all this is that “money” has been printed by governments and central banks everywhere, distributed to their favoured groups and individuals, leaving the non-favoured groups to pick up the costs in the form of price inflation. Off-shoring production costs to s-hole countries over the years has masked some of the price increases.

      To stop currency inflation in the late 70s and early 80s, governments and banks increased interest rates and tried to slow down increases in expenditures. This time is different. Governments, businesses, and households have too much debt to be able to service higher debt costs. Governments are unable to stop spending or they risk uprisings from government workers and dole recipients. The ruling elite predator class has really screwed up with their short-term, self-absorbed, psychopathic actions. The current social/financial system is doomed. Like the old saying about asking the man who jumped off a high cliff how he feels, he replied: “So far, so good”. The great reset is inevitable. With the same psychos in charge, however, we normals will all be worse off than ever.

      Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to notice or care that much about the future.

      1. “Governments, businesses, and households have too much debt to be able to service higher debt costs. Governments are unable to stop spending or they risk uprisings from government workers and dole recipients. The ruling elite predator class has really screwed up with their short-term, self-absorbed, psychopathic actions.”

        This is spot-on. However it’s not that the ruling elite class has “screwed up” – they’ve INTENDED to do this all along. They’ve treated western economies as husks to be sucked dry, and that they have done, very, very well. They’ve sold all us normals out to, as you put it, the s-hole countries, most of all China.

        And make no mistake, this is effectively China’s world now. The next century is not going to be pretty.

        1. I agree with you. What used to be called “the money power” has financed the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Maoists. I think, perhaps, their thinking was that they securing “the best enemy money could buy”. The Rockefellers were instrumental in “opening up” Red China to western manufacturing. And western intellectual property and capital was transferred to support it. Maybe in their hubris these types think they can control what they’re doing. Maybe they’re just malevolent and crazy. I really have no idea. I say they are short-sighted, and that they screwed up, because in the long run, they will be worse off for what they have accomplished. Human progress has always been driven by individual entrepreneurs, individual inventors and innovators, the small enterprise delivering the superior value proposition to the customer, the “little people” who produce and save, and then steward their small capital to improve their lives and their offspring and communities. Human advancement is bottom-up, not a centralized, corporatized, top-down imposition. These psychos are stifling humanity and human ingenuity. If they think they or their descendants will be immunized from the effects of their disastrous actions, they are very misguided. They might be kings of a feudal kingdom, but they’ll be kings of s-faced peasants and not much else. AI and robots will not create a fantasy playground of delights for the ruling elites.

          1. You hit the nail on the head there – the “elites” have simply replaced God with government as the source of all things. They cannot fathom the free market, the invisible hand, spontaneous order. They take it as a given that all things must happen for a reason and there must be some Prime Mover for everything that happens. Surely *somebody* must be in charge of making things happen, right? And why not them? It’s not as if human beings have been quite capable of surviving and prospering for thousands of years without them.

            And don’t even get me started on the “Green New Deal” crap. How insane do you have to be in order to believe there is some small group of men with the God-like powers to arrange the affairs of some 8 billion people in such a way that they can command the wind and the waves – and these people just happen to be politicians, the most venal, corrupt, crooked, hubristic people on the planet? If you believe that the planetary weather can easily and simply be controlled by humans, and further that you’re just the human to do it, you belong in an insane asylum.

          2. They don’t care about humanity.
            THEY are Satanists.
            Satanists want one thing and that one thing is the total destruction of Man.
            They and their Master, want us erased from the Universe FOREVER.

  11. All of these foods are also bad for people who have nothing to do but sit around all day because of lockdowns, thereby increasing diet-related health problems.

    Thanks, government.

  12. Not just food… One of the advertizers I use for my business just jacked up prices for the same service.

    1. 50 years ago the people were thin and the food was fat. Now the people are fat and the food is thin.

  16. Not only shrink the size, increase the price. When they introduce the 1.8 litter bottle of Coke and discontinue the 2 litters, they will have crossed the Rubicon. Most of the hyper-inflation will be hidden by it being digital. No piles of cash needed, just a large bank account.

    1. I remember the 1.5 litre refundable glass bottles of Pepsi and Coke from the late 70’s to mid 80’S before being replaced by the plastic 2 litres bottle.
      They had to have a plastic shrink wrap around them in case they exploded into little pieces from being dropped.
      Heavy as heck too.

  17. In Canada food is one of the items NOT included in inflation figures, along with fuel. Got to keep the inflation figures low.
    Then on your government pensions, CPP, etc., the annual increase is based on the last years inflation.
    So your most needed life requirements can shoot skyward in price, but you won’t be given any more money to buy them, as they are not figured into the calculations………
    Ain’t Canada great??????

  19. Chocolate milk, the small ones used to be 250ml, and 500ml.
    They are now 237ml, and 473ml, or equal to 1 US cup and 1 US pint……
    Might as well just switch to the US sizing, smaller than the Imperial, or metric sizing.
    Is an “Imperial gallon” racist?????

    1. Same with cream.
      The can of beans I used to buy is the same weight but there is much more liquid in the can than there used to be.
      Potato chips: a fanily pack is now 235 gms vs 300 gms a few years ago.
      10 years Premium gas used to be a about 8-10 cents a litre more than regular. Now it’s 24-27 cents more expensive.
      We’ve been getting fcked at the drive through for many years.

  20. People are noticing the food inflation every time they do groceries.
    That is why Little Fidel is getting raped in the polls. Even Nanos has him four points behind O’Cueball.

    1. Random comment, but “O’Cueball” made me remember a Simpson’s clip I happened to come across yesterday. Some sick humour to lighten things up a bit.

      Homer did a tv commercial for a product called “Viagragaine”. “The topical rub for bald, impotent men”.

      The Simpsons family was watching the commercial as it debuted on tv. At its conclusion, an announcer stated “possible side-effects include loss of scalp and penis”.

      “What did they say about my scalp?!”, asked a suddenly worried Homer.

      If Little Fidel starts going around scalpless we’ll have to assume he’s also missing some other anatomy.

  21. This issue has always intrigued me. During tough economic times you can actually see that the boxed pasta is cut shorter. You have to assume that for every 20 or so boxes they produce an extra one with the selected shortening. The same can be noticed in various snacks. Potato chips are an obvious one. They put in less chips, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they have an air hose on the line that will inflate the bag a little before the seal to give the perception of a full bag.

    The thing that really intrigues me is that when the economy starts rolling again, they tend to return to the original larger portions. There is nothing illegal about it as long as they adjust the weight notifications on the the containers…but some of these companies don’t understand the concept of “subtle.” They make it too obvious and that is the last perception they need from the public.

  22. It’s not just people food; a well known pet food manufacturer suddenly has tins of cat food that are 20 grams lighter than before.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation