Dear Customers,
Don’t you just love an election year? Well, I don’t! Political ads, finger pointing, outrageous claims for and/or against. . . “I’m (fill-in-the-blank) and I approve this gross exaggeration”. It just gets old months before it’s actually time to vote!
There is one claim that I do agree with, but I don’t feel it’s a result of the current inflationary economy. It’s what our country’s president has referred to as “shrink-flation”! However, it’s not new, it’s not based solely upon the existing inflationary conditions, and it has been around since time began.
With the advent of scanning cash registers, I have done the bulk of the entering of UPC’s for new items into our point-of-sale system so that items will ring up at the cash register. It is required by law that every time an item changes its weight or size, it must be issued a new UPC code. Sometimes that’s the only way I know if an item has “shrunk”. Manufacturers often don’t advertise when they do it, but suddenly something that you’ve sold 100 times is no longer ringing up at the register. Come to find out, it’s ½ an ounce smaller than it was the last time your ordered it in!
When I was a young boy, candy bars were only a nickel, and they were huge! Or at least they seemed that way to me. Turns out, I was right. They were huge and now they’re a fraction of what they once were. Pasta sauces – all brands – used to be sold in 32oz jars. Now they’re all most universally sold in 24oz jars! That’s 8oz less per jar! If you were thinking your pasta seems dryer, it’s because it is.
Tuna fish was sold in 8oz cans. Then 7½, 7, 6½ and now 5 ounces. Hardly enough to make a good tuna-fish sandwich! Potato chips and salty snacks are a huge culprit. The once 16oz bags of potato or tortilla chips are now lucky to have 9oz and a lot of air in them. The same trend holds true for just about every product in the store including detergents and cleaning supplies.
But, what’s the alternative? Rising costs for raw materials, minimum wage increases, shipping costs, etc. make it necessary to either give less for more – or go out of business. And if you can recall the end result of the recent pandemic, many, many retailers, manufacturers and companies did just that! Despite what you’ve been told “shrink-flation” is not a cause of inflation – it’s the result of it.