French supermarket Carrefour has put stickers on its shelves this week warning shoppers of “shrinkflation” - where packet contents are getting smaller while prices are not.

  • Carrefour has identified 26 products that have shrunk, without a price reduction to match, made by food giants including Nestle, PepsiCo and Unilever.

    It’s always the ones you most expect

  • But it is unlikely that UK supermarkets would follow in Carrefour’s footsteps, according to retail expert Ged Futter, because the strategy risks “poisoning” relationships between retailers and food firms. “This is a very blunt way of of trying to compete,” he said. “To do that with your manufacturers, it won’t help.”

    One of the many reasons why consumer and worker’s rights are doomed in the Anglo-Saxon world: standing up for them is “rude”

    • The second capitalists gather together they are bound to conspire to fuck over ordinary folks.

      That’s not Marx - that’s literally Adam Smith, the guy who hypothesized the invisible hand of the market that has since been turned into a complete strawman leading people to believe capitalism will somehow fix itself.

      Spoiler: It won’t.

      • Which Adam Smith then follows by saying the craftspeople need to form guilds (unions) in response, which is the only scenario where the invisible hand approach could work

        • The invisible hand was really just mentioned once in relation to the dynamics of trade between states, the whole concept is just taken out of context.

      •  Rocket   ( @Rocket@lemmy.ca ) 
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        1 year ago

        Funny that he thought that the capitalists need to conspire. It turns out the ordinary folks will try to fuck over each other no matter what. The only workaround is for the ordinary folks to reach a “gentleman’s agreement” to not try and fuck over each other (i.e. form a union), but that proves difficult as it means having to not fuck over each other while establishing the union – a cross too difficult for most ordinary people to bear.

  • Dollar General in the US based their entire business model on tricking people like this. They sell stuff at 75% the price of places like Wal-Mart, while hoping people won’t notice that the item is half the size of the one at Wal-Mart so you end up actually paying 150% of what you would if you went somewhere else. They also run all the local stores out of business so that people don’t have any other nearby choices. Very scummy business.

  • This is honestly a win win for the store and consumers - in my experience store brands rarely change their sizes. So this just keeps the customers informed and potentially funnels some sales into the store brand.

    The issue is when the store brand gets smaller a year or two down the line.