[HN Gopher] 'Shrinkflation' strikes shoppers across the country
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'Shrinkflation' strikes shoppers across the country
Author : paulpauper
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-08-02 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dailymail.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dailymail.co.uk)
| ksajadi wrote:
| Not sure why we need another name for the very old concept of
| Hidden Inflation which also covers more than the size but the
| quality of the materials used to produce products.
| https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Hidden+In...
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I wonder if this will have any effect on obesity rates, or if
| people will just buy two jugs of sweet tea instead of one.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| This is piece is strait confirmation bias for people who think
| inflation is happening. Besides cherry picking things that have
| gone up more then average last year(bacon, apples bread ...),
| They share this chart[0] with the 12 month percentage change
| average and a spike in June 2021, when there is clearly negative
| spike in June 2020, with addressing this. [0]https://www.dailymai
| l.co.uk/news/article-9818391/Shrinkflati...
| cwkoss wrote:
| I feel like food prices are likely lower than they should be, so
| I kind of view this as "the market is working"?
|
| It's not great for consumers, but I don't think shrinking sizes
| is necessarily worse than raising prices. Is it that people may
| not notice that some find objectionable?
|
| I think I'd rather reduce farm subsidies and raise the minimum
| wage, and let the market reprice accordingly, rather than try to
| legislate against 'shrinkflation'
| MikeUt wrote:
| > I feel like food prices are likely lower than they should be,
| so I kind of view this as "the market is working"?
|
| Lucky for us supermarket chains, food companies, and
| agribusiness, are very transparent when it comes to their costs
| and profit, so this is easy to verify. /s
| Dayshine wrote:
| It is incredibly annoying to find you suddenly need to spend
| twice as much money to make the same meal rather than the 20%
| of extra unit price.
| cwkoss wrote:
| 50% of previous value is obviously worse than 80%. If the
| effective price change was the same between the two would you
| have a strong objection to resizing vs raising price?
| dpedu wrote:
| Why are food prices lower than they should be? By how much?
|
| Shrinking sizes _IS_ raising prices.
| cwkoss wrote:
| The commodification of foods has led to a race to the bottom:
| quality is reduced to make it seem like you're getting a
| better deal when you really aren't.
|
| - Fruits and vegetables are getting less nutritional as we've
| optimized for shelf-life, size and appearance.
|
| - Ingredients in processed foods are tweaked to appeal to the
| lizard-brain and maximize profit at the expense of
| nutritional value. ex. adding large amounts of high fructose
| corn syrup to make otherwise unpalatable low-quality
| ingredients more appealing
|
| - Farm subsidies have led to overproduction of low-
| nutritional-quality grains and encouraged the creation of
| processed foods which can capitalize on this market
| distortion
|
| Many cheap foods that are available today are not healthy
| because market forces push them into cutting so they are able
| to compete on price. I'd rather prices or portion sizes get
| worse than continuing this race to the bottom.
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(page generated 2021-08-02 23:03 UTC)