Thursday 16 December 2010

Are we being ripped off?

The answer is YES WE ARE!

Manufacturers are slowly, sometimes oh so slowly shrinking their products whilst retaining the same price. I have noticed this shrinkage on several products recently, particularly tubs of yoghurt, sandwich fillers and the like, where once opened you can see that there is a distinct drop in the level of identically priced foods.
We stocked up on Cheese strings for The Granddaughter and Grandson this autumn and I rediscovered that I like these too, so we bought a few recently for me. Guess what? Exactly the same package but a much shorter cheese string! No doubt we will soon be seeing a new packaging with NEW IMPROVED cheese strings and inside cheese string in a package resized to disguises the loss of cheese in this new pack.


They are not the only ones.
I sometimes buy Kleenex balsam tissues, if I have a heavy cold, they really work and keep my nose from getting sore. I had a cold not long ago and needed to stock up again and found that Kleenex have changed the name and called it Soothes.


Apart from the new name, the box is the same but the contents are now less. I have not had a cold since buying the new packs, so I have not yet been able to test these still keep my nose pain free. Maybe that has not changed but the label does say 'with a touch of basalm'. So maybe that is reduced too.

Above the Kleenex box unopened

The Soothes box unopened

It is not just the tussues that are soft, as far as these cynical manufacturers are concerned, we are not their loyal customers, but a soft touch to be cheated. Disguising the changes to their product is sneaky and I don’t like sneaky. I would not be too incensed if the price went up a little, I would grumble but resign myself to the change because it seems to be inevitable, but sneaking a cost cut into a box which is otherwise assumed to be the same is a real rip off and really annoys me! I am more upset by someone trying to sneak a change past me than by an open up front price increase.
So do they think we are all stupid? – of course they do!

2 comments:

  1. oooh...... a fellow curmudgeon. Fantastic.

    And don't forget about marketing snafu. It's how those pesky shampoo people try to double their company profits with just one word in their instructions on the pack.

    Repeat.

    regards.....

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  2. I've seen it happen with granola bars. Maybe you call them something else over there - cereal bars? While the price continues to rise, the bars continue to shrink, and they don't even bother to change the wrapper, so you can see the increasing shrinkage take place each time you buy a new box. But we ARE the dummies - why do we keep buying these products then?

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