To think shrinkflation is getting out of control?

[Forwardthinkingturtle]

I’m sick of buying toothpaste in a huge box only to find that it’s a small tube 75ml. Even the ones that promise “25% extra free” are only 100ml which is what the standard size was a couple of years ago, so you’re not actually technically getting anything free!

Toilet rolls have shrunk and the quality is crap… excuse the pun.

I had a Magnum ice cream for the first time in a while and I honestly thought it was a mini sized one. They used to have 4 in a pack and now they only have 3.

Don’t even get me started on a Toblerone!

AIBU to despise the dishonesty of brands way more than the actual price inflation? Prices have risen but just be honest about what you’re selling (or not selling!) to us.

Or you buy a pack of 4 baking potatoes; one is huge and the other three tiny.

😆 You'd have to be hard up for reasons to celebrate if Tesco profits are a highlight! 😆

I work in food manufacturing and honestly these comments make me laugh. Supermarkets want to maintain huge margins on everything they sell. So in some areas of the store 50% of the price you pay goes to them. They then want to promote the product to let's say save 20% but then expect the supplier to contribute to the discount as well so that they don't have to eat into their own profit margin.

For suppliers, all costs have gone up in basic overheads like electricity and staffing. So have most raw materials. They need to produce the products and pay staff and make some money themselves. But many shoppers don't have enough money week to week to buy the same size pack at a much higher price, so we do everything we can to keep the purchase price affordable and unfortunately that means smaller packs and often changing recipes to cheaper ingredients.

And even still many, many food and grocery manufacturers are going out of business because they can't make enough money. It's not at all as black and white as you think.

One word deodorant!

What the hell is going on there? I ordered some with the shopping the other day. It looked like it was for Barbie when it arrived. No wonder it was cheap.

Used Dove for years. Old deodorant, new price- given a fancy name to sound worth the extra money. Or old price, rubbish product that makes me smell!

Totally agree about toothpaste. I have to buy double the amount of tubes I used to.

I bought a small chocolate bar the other day. For crying out loud, it was titchy tiny! 2 bites and it was gone, it was definitely bigger the last time I bought it. Everything is just smaller, we are being robbed.

Just state it then. It’s the not being upfront. Call it an affordable pack.

Whays fox’s biscuits excuse with the truck packaging?

Something I noticed recently with Lurpak spreadable butter in Asda
small tub, 250g £2:75
medium tub 400g (used to be 500g) £4:00
large tub 750g £7:25
so, they’re pretty much £10-£11/kg but they were selling the 600g “Tickled Pink” version, that was raising funds for breast cancer charities Coppa Feel and Breast Cancer Now, for £3:00 so only £5/kg. Goes to show, when they want to, they can sell a product at a reasonable price!!

That's not always the case, though - Whole Earth peanut butter comes in about 4 different sizes of jar; and Kellogg's cereals will frequently have something like 560g or 710g (I can't remember the exact numbers) - very often with supposedly 'X% extra free', which blurs the sizes even more.

I take your point about having both a 14-pack and a 16-pack would be silly, but the only reason that the 14-pack exists is to hoodwink us - they haven't genuinely worked out that people only want to buy 14, as 16 would be too many!

Most chocolate makers now make their 'standard' bars the same size as what a mini/snack-size bar would have been not all that long ago.

It comes with the lie that "people want to make healthier choices and eat smaller snacks" - like they don't just have two instead - but I'm pretty sure most people don't have a budgetary preference/requirement whereby they couldn't manage with the price going down in accordance with the smaller amount they're now getting; there isn't a 'folk have too much money' crisis!

They're going to eventually get to a point where all 'standard' sized food makes an average person feel like Gulliver when they handle it. Mind, they'll probably introduce 'new big family economy value packs' which are the same size as the old standard ones, but now at multiples of the old price.

Then some big shot campaigner will compare the 'new big family economy value packs' with the 'standard' ones (i.e. the now vastly shrunk tiny ones), declare a new obesity crisis and urge the government to levy swingeing new taxes on 'massive' portions.

Yes - 3 weeks in a row - rotten mouldy tops on broccoli - Aldi 🤨

I wonder where it will end, because if companies continue to make products smaller, eventually they’ll be tiny. A Mars Bar will be an inch long. Will they still think we won’t notice?!!

I bought a Mars Bar 😭

Gold Bars are becoming an absolute joke. So small, if they get any smaller they may actually get to the point where a piece of real gold the same weight would cost less.

Packs of baby wipes have gotten smaller recently. They’ve only taken approximately five wipes out but when I picked them up I knew straight away.

My favourite daily shower gel has shrunk and the bottle seemed half empty this week. It’s a Nivea brand.

Crips. I’ve stopped buying a lot of certain ones as the bags are empty.

Yes, that's so annoying - with roll-ons what they've done is taken a chunk out of the bottle, so it's no longer a round bottle, same price, about 1/3 lower content.

I am really tired of seeing this with everything I buy. I would rather pay a higher price for the original size of product. If they want to introduce a smaller size why don't they just do it and keep it alongside the original size? All it means is you end up buying two of everything, wasting packaging and taking up unnecessary space in your cupboards.

But many shoppers don't have enough money week to week to buy the same size pack at a much higher price, so we do everything we can to keep the purchase price affordable and unfortunately that means smaller packs and often changing recipes to cheaper ingredients.

But how are you going to fatten a pig by constantly weighing it?

Folk know that they have less money and can afford less, so how does it help them in any way to try to make them think that they're still getting the same 'standard' size rather than facing the fact that they can now only afford the smaller one - or a standard one less often - and they'll just have to eke it out? If anything, it makes it worse if they think they're still getting the same, and then they suddenly realise that it's all gone - whereas with a smaller packet, they would have known to be more economical with using it from the start.

Nobody is expecting the supermarkets and massive food companies to operate at a loss. We all know about inflation and that prices regularly go up across the board - meaning that we either have to keep paying more for them or hit a point where we have to stop buying something if it becomes unaffordable and do without it. We just don't like to be deliberately deceived and ripped off at every corner; the additional lies about it supposedly being for our health or convenience or "what consumers have told us they want" just serve to rub salt into the wound.

Dove shower gel has reduced in size from 500ml to 400ml and increased the price from £2.50 to £4.50 per bottle.

I honestly don't know how they have the front, and I've stopped buying it now. I wonder how many others have done similar because it's outrageous.

Anyone notice the thickness of bacon has reduced, normal is now very thin and usually ends up breaking when you try and separate the slices, have to buy thick cut now to keep it in intact.

Also fruit and vegetables aren’t lasting as long, melons and peppers especially this year seem to go off within days of buying them and lettuces now full of dirt.

Maryland mini cookies, you’d be lucky to get six cookies in a packet, 6x6 in a multi pack so that’s £1.50 for 36 tiny cookies, plus manufacturing is so shoddy one bag has always been heat sealed to the main bag and ends up breaking when you open it rendering it unusable for packed lunches.

Also, call me a cynic, but I wonder if it's deliberate that baby/cleaning wipes now always seem to be jammed in, in a way that you really struggle to get just one out at a time, coupled with weaker and less reliable reseal tabs, which makes them dry out more quickly.

Makes me wonder if that's deliberate too, to make people use more than they need each time or them becoming useless, so they keep coming back sooner to buy more.

The other incredibly annoying thing is rounded lids on shampoo, shower gel, washing up liquid etc. It’s done deliberately so we can’t turn them upside down to get the last dregs out, and end up having to buy a new bottle sooner. So they make the bottle smaller, charge us more for it, and prevent us using all of it. I suppose that’s capitalism!

Potatoes in general. A 5lb bag is now 2kg (4.4lb) and twice the price. The bag will be 50% useable potatoes, and the rest are tiny little pebbles that are impossible to peel. So you’re actually getting about 2lb of spuds for what you used to pay for 10lb.

The one that absolutely pisses me off is fresh cut herbs like coriander - used to be a nice neat bunch in a pack where you could use a bit then put a trickle of water in the pack to keep the stems fresh for ages.

Now many stores just fling the stalks in all over the place like they've been in a tornado so it's much harder to put them in water.

Also, you used to get skinned fillets of salmon. Hardly ever see them.

They'll probably try to gaslight us by telling us they only seemed to be bigger before, because we were children!

Potatoes and UK grown fruit and veg are a result of the crappy weather we’ve been having though, they’re not deliberately growing smaller potatoes! I was taking to a farmer earlier this “summer” who said there’d be a lot of hungry people this winter 🙁.

What really bugs me is when they take one item out but don’t even bother to change the package size, so you just get a space in the box where the missing one should be! At least try to make it less obvious 🙈.

I understand that some people might not be able to afford the relative price for the original size of product, but reducing the amount of product must increase production cost because the ratio of product to packaging has gone down, so this is false economy - we are paying for more packaging.

In the example of roll-on deodorant I mentioned upthread, the packaging must be a significant part of the product cost as it's not just a straightforward wrapper or bottle.

It's bad enough that they didn't make deodorants in larger sizes to begin with, as you don't need it to be portable if it's the one you keep in your bathroom but this change in the bottle shape is taking the absolute piss from a sustainability perspective (and before anyone jumps on the thread to say that I should rub myself with a block of sea-salt or whatever if I care about the planet, so called 'natural' deodorants don't touch my menopausal sweats, I need an anti-persipirant or else my armpits are sodden).

Also, new for this year, do they think nobody will notice that a tub of Celebrations is a lot shallower than last year?

The manufacturers must love products that aren't on sale all year around, as it's their perfect opportunity to reduce the pack size without it being so obvious.