Apparently there's a wave of companies putting less of their stuff in packages without acknowledging by way of size changes that the same $2.69 for a small bag gets you less Fritos, for example. That's shrinkflation. When people notice, some howl.
Companies choose to shrink their products rather than charge more for a simple reason: Consumers often pay more attention to prices than sizes.
When quantity goes down, “people might notice, but often, they don’t,” said John Gourville, a professor at Harvard Business School. “You don’t get sticker shock.”
One of the goods to which this is happening seems be rolls of toilet paper. Four years ago, rolls came almost 5 inches wide and similarly thick, advertised as super and jumbo. Today, many rolls seem to be more like 4x4 inches.
In this household, that's cause for celebration. One of our bathrooms comes with a neatly tiled, recessed TP nook. Before the current wave of TP downsizing, it was a struggle to find rolls that would fit. The current 4x4 size is just what the builders built for. The annoyance wasn't so great as to cause us to remodel, but it was persistent and nagging. Yay for this instance of shrinkflation; we don't want or need monster size toilet paper!
I'm sure this respite from the TP hunt will pass. Pretty soon the makers will try to upsell larger rolls of paper as "abundance" and I'll be hunting for the little old rolls again ... The free market, ain't it great?
There's a number of things grocery-wise I just don't buy any longer. Toilet apaper isn't going to be one of them. My usual grocery store had no ice cream in quarts, just 20 oz. at the quart size and there were no quarts on the shelf. I shouldn't be eating it anyway so maybe I'll just bake myself something when the urge hits.
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