Tales From Aisle Ten (V)

"Why Juice Boxes Are 10% Smaller But Still Cost The Same"

Article here.

Because us grocery clerks love to screw you over, that's why. We cackle with glee each and every time one of our esteemed customers chooses to assume we and we alone are responsible for shrinking the cereal boxes and juice cartons and...well, hell, everything. The groceries we shrink at night, using dark retail sorcery. Then we shrink your wallets by day. It's soooo much fun, especially since we don't buy groceries ourselves. Did you really think we need to eat? Pshaw.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Grocery stores don't generally gouge their customers. I know you have no proof of this--until the world finally gets around to putting costs as well as retails on price tags, anyway--but trust me. There are exceptions (the produce department has some *huge* margins), but on many items in dry grocery, we make pennies; on sale items we almost always lose money, sometimes quite a bit of it. Somebody may well be rolling in it, but it ain't us.

Crop failures obviously drive price increases. Just two days ago, the retail on a kilogram of McCain red bag fries went from $1.99 to $3.67 in one leap. This actually didn't surprise me overmuch, because I've been told potatoes of any quality at all are somewhat hard to find right now. The same thing happened with grapefruit juice a few years back when Florida was temporarily a hurricane playpen. For over two months we had no grapefruit juice at all. We *could* have offered it, but we chose not to: our cost was something like nine bucks a carton. Then, when grapefruits started to show up, so did the juice...at substantially higher retails than people were accustomed to paying. It took over a year for the price to fall, and it didn't fall by much.

Milk just went up, too. We're at $4.67 right now for a 4L bag of 2%, 1% or skim. That's subject to change at any moment, depending on what the competition does or doesn't do. But, as I tell everyone who complains about milk prices, they've gone up by fifteen percent in fifteen years. That's *well* under the rate of inflation. Plus, we lose money on every bag of milk we sell.

As for the shrinkage...it's happening everywhere. As the linked article above states, people would rather pay the same for less quantity than pay more for the same quantity. It's not a trick: it's market research in action.

Do bear in mind, too, that most people, yours truly definitely included, eat too much food. Here's an experiment to try: one day, eat only the "suggested serving" of whatever you consume. Good luck with that. I freely admit I can't do it: when I'm hungry, I want to EAT, damnit. None of this "quarter of a box of Kraft dinner" or "eleven potato chips" or even "a quarter sized piece of meat." If you're just going to tease me like that, let me starve already.

That all said, maybe, just maybe, smaller packages are good for you. It sure beats the trend we had in the eighties and nineties, to super size the hell out of everything.

I agree, some of the packaging reductions are kind of insane. When I started in May, 2001, a 2L tub of Nestle Confectionery ice cream--Rolo, Smarties and the like---went for $4.99. The package has shrunk three times since then and the price continues to rise: it's now a 1.5L tub and it's $6.99. Little wonder nobody buys it unless it's on sale.

That's an annoying thing from our perspective: nobody buys ANYTHING unless it's on sale. That's maybe a bit of an exaggeration...but not as much of one as you'd think. When you have twelve different grocery chains to choose from, everything is on sale somewhere. So if you're ever wondering why it's the last day of the ad and we have no sale product, it's because anything we're stuck with at the end of the ad, we're STUCK with. I still have frozen vegetables from the first ad we ran as a FreshCo, week ending April 28. Good thing they don't expire until late next year.