Quote:
Originally Posted by tophcfa
Has anyone else noticed that not only does just about everything cost quite a bit more at the grocery store, but the package size of most things are also getting smaller.
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I had to check and see if this was just a really old thread that someone had bumped with a new response.
Shrinkage in lieu of increased prices has been going on - sheesh - decades. You might not remember when you could get a "biggie fry" from Wendy's for the same price as the current large. And if you check out the pre-packaged cheese department you might take a peek at the actual weight - many of them are now 6 ounces, instead of 8 ounces. Same price, smaller package. That happened around 12 years ago.
Most of the Drakes' snack foods have been reduced in size. Starkist reduced their 6-ounce can to a 5-ounce can in 2008. The 5-ounce can is of course more expensive now, because of inflation, but it's also proportionately more expensive because of this reduction in size.
Have you bought a Fishwich at McDonald's lately? It's not even 2 ounces of fish anymore, it used to be almost 3 ounces. They claim they use a 1/2 slice of cheese. But their whole slice size has also been reduced, resulting in around 1/3 of the size of the original full slice.
They're $4.59 per sandwich too. Consider the fish is the "main ingredient" and take $1.59 per sandwich off to account for the tartar sauce, cheese, and hyper-aerated bun. That leaves us with $3.00 per piece of fish, at less than 2 ounces per piece. Round it up to a full 2 ounces, and that means $1.50 per ounce. There's 16 ounces in a pound. So your fillet of fish is costing you $24 per pound of pollock. You can get 1.25 pounds of frozen breaded pollock at Walmart for $5.
We pay whatever we're willing to pay, for whatever we want. The corporations know this. They will charge the highest they can that the market will bear. That's capitalism. And if the market is starting to waver, they'll reduce the size, to prevent raising the price. But the price is not the same thing as the cost. It costs us more. But we pay the same price we paid yesterday, for less of the same thing today.