You wouldn’t pay the same amount for half a sandwich as you would for a full one. You wouldn’t pay for a “supersized” meal and be content with the regular size. So why are you paying for full-sized groceries and receiving minis?
Perhaps you’ve heard of downsizing in reference to layoffs ““ a practice that, as students, does not necessarily affect us. But our sinking economy is causing downsizing in areas beyond the job market. Downsizing, in terms of selling less product in a standard package for the same or higher price, is becoming more popular. This means fewer potato chips in a bag, less cereal in a box while you’re still paying as high a price as ever. And you thought the recession wasn’t affecting you.
As our country’s economic activity continues to diminish, the cost of raw materials continues to climb. Over the past few years, manufacturers have made budget cuts everywhere they could, due to the rise in cost of raw materials.
Yet manufacturers have reached the point where there’s not much fat left to trim, and so their financial burden has been passed down to us, the consumers. But because of our competitive market, manufacturers and retailers are reluctant to raise the price of their product outright. They fear breaking a popularly accepted price point because doing so would give their competition the upper hand. Surely, the last time you bought paper towels, you scanned the aisle for the lowest price for the most rolls. Knowing this consumer trend, manufacturers and retailers often opt for a sneakier price-increase tactic: downsizing their product.
Changes in product sizes are virtually unnoticeable to the undiscerning eye. A box of Apple Jacks now holds 15 ounces where it once held 17. Fruit Loops now hold 17 ounces where they once held 19.7. A Hershey’s bar that was previously eight ounces is now 6.8 ounces and parades around as a “Giant bar.” Frankly, with so many weight-loss-centered New Year’s resolutions, a cut in portion sizes isn’t really the worst thing for the American consumer. It is the deceptive nature of these downsizes that is really the key issue.
A sneaky case of Cottonelle bath tissue downsizing was recently unrolled by an online source, mouseprint.org, that works to expose fine print in advertising. They visually compared two packages that both claimed to hold 304 sheet rolls with each sheet measuring 4.2 by 4.0 inches. Yet, one package was noticeably taller than the other. After contacting the company and learning of the company’s downsize from 4.5 inch sheets of bath tissue to 4.2, the site deduced that some of the older 4.5 width rolls were put into a newer wrapper that had the new lowered sheet count and narrower width on the label. They speculated that the packaging mistake was perhaps “an interim step in the downsizing process to hide the change for anyone comparing the older label to the newer one.”
Such hurdles to fair-price-comparisons should not be allowed in our market. What’s more is that in many cases, a downsize cannot even be detected through side-by-side comparison.
I didn’t notice downsizing until I was helping my mom cook dinner over break. A box of Dreamfields pasta, weighing one pound, used to fit perfectly into a canister in our kitchen. I watched my mom empty the contents of the box into the canister, and to my surprise the pasta did not reach the top. Something was wrong. I checked the box. The box that used to read 16 ounces now read 13. There was no discount for the missing three ounces, but rather a price increase. What’s more troubling is that according to a Nielsen report from this past summer, products like dried pasta are supposed to be unscathed by our economic downturn. The inaccuracy of this assertion supports a different claim that 2009 will hold a commodity cost increase double that of 2008, leaving no product immune to downsizing.
This supermarket shrinkdown is surely shielding us from the reality of our economic situation. We are witnessing few price increases at the grocery store, yet prices have skyrocketed. The American consumer did not consent to having the wool pulled over her eyes. According to Nielsen, 47 percent of American consumers would prefer to buy larger products for more money than having their normal portions downsized, while only 9 percent of surveyed Americans showed support for downsizing.
Manufacturers are thus not only miniaturizing their products, but also minimizing the consumer’s influence in the marketplace by forcing us to comply with a price-increase strategy that we would otherwise oppose.
Downsizing has more of a downside than just being deceptive. It produces “upsized” waste. With fewer plastic baggies in a box, there is more waste per baggie as the box is more quickly emptied and discarded, and a new box is purchased just to reach the same fate. Downsizing also leads to bungled recipes. A recipe that calls for a can of Starkist tuna will now come out less fishy due to the shrunken content in the cans.
The unknowing consumers don’t know to adjust their recipe to the new smaller portions until it’s too late, and who has time to calculate conversions for the missing ounce or two here and there?
As college students, our purse strings are already tighter than most, and we tend to rely on price-comparison shopping to help us budget. Yet fair comparisons are far more difficult to make, now that downsizing has confused the market against our will. Manufacturers and retailers should be increasing prices outright instead of trying to sneak them under our noses. They’ve downsized their product, not my intelligence, and I’m not fooled.
Disgusted by downsizing? E-mail Hein at nhein@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.