Here's an idea, stop constantly feeding yourself from companies who enjoy playing psychological pricing and ingredient/filler games on massive scales. Chances are you have someone in your town who roasts coffee beans. Chances are there are local eggs you could be getting easy, or with a little more effort, harvesting your own. Stop feeding yourself and your offspring insanely high levels of sugar breakfast cereal. Have you realized that they skirt food definitions around you? When was the last time you bought real dairy iced cream? Why are we chlorinating chicken and pumping it full of saline solution for the shelves, again?
This article is frustrating because the onus is not directly on the manufacturing... consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition. But who can blame them, we have entire governments building pyramids to suit questionably beneficial food industries. Where does all that corn come from for our addiction to high fructose corn syrup?
Stop letting people and companies who do not care about YOU, feed you and your family.
Yup, this is the real solution. It's not easy, but it's the truth. So long as we allow supply chains to be centralized and verticalized, we introduce not just more middleman links to allow for adulteration, but more incentives for the middlemen to do so. People seem to forget that the adulteration involved in lowering prices has second order effects that can very much be unknown. Just a century ago, custom cough syrup tonics containing cocaine and heroin were considered completely safe. Even beyond the adulterants we know to be harmful, how many others which are currently GRAS will in the future be looked at as tragedies? Hopefully, few. But if not...
I think the solution to this problem is to increase supply chain locality, as you said. It would be great to have more solutions that directly connected buyers to local farms. Another option I've thought about is building infrastructure around making it possible for folks to run microfarms inside their own homes -- if this could be done in a convenient way, it would be the 100% ideal solution, but short of that, I think reforming the current system to be local farm -> consumer is still closer to 99% ideal.
> consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition.
This idea that "consumers allow the behavior" is a very pernicious one - it's common in the context of global warming too ("if only people stopped driving their car and started caring about the planet!").
It's an utter reversion of causality. People are going to do whatever makes the most sense given their own context, and if you're struggling time and money wise to take care of your family in a nutritional desert [0], and the only jobs you can get require you to drive an hour a day, then of course you're going to be buying frozen waffles at Walmart and Big Mac takeout for your kids and driving your car around. Not to mention the billions of dollars spent on advertising to manipulate people - what do you want citizens to do, when their own educational system fails to teach them the most basic literacy/numerical skills? [1]
We need to be angry at governments and companies, not people doing what they can to merely get by.
Not only that, but even if you can afford (both in time and money) to shop for honest, nutritional alternatives, how many people are really going to spend a significant amount of their time seeking out and acquiring these alternatives?
The OP talks about finding local sources of coffee and eggs, but many people would have no idea of where to get those, nor have any means of verifying that they were really what they claimed and not fraudulent.
As a consumer, I have no way of knowing if, for instance, the people hawking food at my local farmer's market (which I'm lucky enough to live within a convenient distance of) are really source their food locally or just pretend to. I have no means of verifying whether their food is really "organic", or is merely sold as such.
To take an example, the adulteration of "raw", "organic" honey with fillers like corn syrup is a serious problem.[1][2] An individual consumer has virtually no means at their disposal to determine which honey is genuine, short of becoming a beekeeper themselves or having a trusted beekeper friend, which is (I would venture to guess) the case for approximately 0% of the population.
The same goes for pretty much every other product. In aggregate, for all of the products a typical consumer buys, this can not be solved at an individual level.
The disruption to supply chains from COVID and panic buying has resulted in my local grocery store carrying more local and regional products to replace the ones that have shortages.
They already carried local products, but that has increased.
Why say that? The OP is absolutely right about this issue. The fact that you get more local post COVID-19 is just temporary, they’ll go back to the way it used to be before and that is very questionable
People are buying the new products, and that will increase the market for them, which means that the situation cannot just return to before.
If you're so pessimistic, well, why do you think anyone cares about exhortations to buy local? Something will prevent them from doing so.
Also, it's kind of odd if pessimism makes you think the effects of COVID will vanish promptly. People normally adapt to recent events by assuming the possibility of a recurrence exists.
People are buying the new products due to a lack of cheaper alternatives, which you said yourself (it's the whole reason they're carrying local items in the first place).
Once those cheaper items return to shelves, a significant portion of the shoppers will return to them.
The article is from 2018 and the context you are missing spans a large area. Maybe try being less relaxed and complacent? Also consider reading the article. Your comment indicates you missed the points.
There literally isn't enough productive capacity in the world, at present, to feed people this way.
The only way to get healthy food to most people is for the regulatory power of the government to step in, backed up by the vigilance of the people. Capitalism won't solve this problem. Your individual choices won't solve it. Engaged citizens using their right to regulate business is the only solution.
To be cheeky, I didn't see any real food in the picture nor the article. My fruit and vegetables aren't getting any smaller.
Frankly, given the problems with health, diet, and obesity in most of the world, anything that makes more nutritional food compete easier with packaged food seems like a good thing. Like "packaged food is ripping us off" would be an excellent meme if it took any real hold. We're dying.
I watched a video that compared the food we have in our convenience stores to what they have in Japan (fresh soups, vegetables, fish) and it really opened my eyes about how our lives/health could be, and how effortless healthy choices could be. Until then, the only thing perishable at my local 7/11 is a mealy saran wrapped apple and it has to somehow compete with all the tastier packaged food.
You should have spent a little bit more time reading the article than the admittedly poor headline. The article isn't about making "more nutritional food compete easier with packaged food", it's about how packaged /products/ (not just food) are stealthily shrinking as prices remain fixed so as to slowly increase effective unit price to the end consumer.
That is the point of the article, and your comment has nothing to do with it.
I did read the article. It's solely concerned with packaged food. Boxes of Cocoa Puffs and other crap are getting smaller.
You confused an opinion I introduced in my comment as a summary of the article. I'm claiming that there's a silver lining in packaged food getting smaller.
I don't think there's much interesting discussion about the article itself. "Hey, yeah, I did notice my Ovaltine canisters getting smaller." So brace yourself for more people making higher level commentary than that.
I just went back and looked to see if I missed some after-the-ad section.
After re-reading the article, I think it's pretty dishonest to assert that I'm missing its point. That it mentions some things beyond food didn't distract me from the things (the bulk of the article) it does say about food. Its only two charts are about food.
This useless exchange must be why the charge of "u didn't read the article" is discouraged in HN's guidelines. In your quest to unmask me as a filthy article-dodger, you also didn't contribute to the discussion beyond mentioning that in an article chiefly about food, some other packaged goods were brought up. And presumably it was a grave error on my part to only talk about the main charge of the article -- which is the only part I had something to say about -- and not the whole domain of implications -- which I have nothing to say about.
> In your quest to unmask me as a filthy article-dodger
> it was a grave error on my part to only talk about the main charge of the article -- which is the only part I had something to say about -- and not the whole domain of implications -- which I have nothing to say about.
That's more the issue, isn't it? You don't have anything to say about the whole domain of implications? Come on. I'm sure you can think of some. I dislike crappy clickbait articles as much as the next person, and I don't deny that this article belabored a point that could have easily been condensed into something much terser and to the point, which is that it's borderline false advertising to use this kind of dark UX pattern with packaging.
Moreover, I disagree that "anything that makes more nutritional food compete easier with packaged food seems like a good thing" when you don't have to look very far into the past to see masses of people killed by famine time [1] and time [2] again. Obesity is surely not aided by lower quality food, but it surely is even less aided by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that is sweeping much of the world, and no amount of good nutrition will save folks from that.
It might be true that packaged food (and packaged products) becoming lower quality makes "nutritional food compete" more easily with it, but that presupposes that we should accept that packaged products are out to dishonestly swindle us, and that this is just the price of doing business. You notice that "the only thing perishable at my local 7/11 is a mealy saran wrapped apple and it has to somehow compete with all the tastier packaged food" but have you thought about why that is the case? Have you thought about the economic incentives, and all the lobbying that is in place to create continual financial incentives to adulterated packaged food created by a megalith of large corporate lock-in? Do you think that for those who have the means to eat higher quality food, they won't be buying from a 7/11 anyways, and for those who cannot afford that, they're stuck eating increasingly poorer quality trash which doesn't nourish them and slowly starves them?
And the whole domain of implications of that -- again, you have nothing to say there about that? Come on. Whether you think that it's something that's good or bad, something that can or could be stopped or not -- I'm sure you can think of a few.
It's not an accusation. The commenter was factually inaccurate and missed a crucial detail which is very material in determining what the article is actually about. If you miss that, I think that it would be a little bit ironic to make a cheeky comment about what the article was trying to say.
Fair. Maybe the rules say '"Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' to avoid this stoking this exact kind of inflammation and defensiveness, which detracts from the discourse. You have a point.
I already know that shrinking a package is a common tactic, but I also know it goes in cycles. For instance, long ago, spaghetti used to come in 1 lb boxes. Then I started seeing reduced size packages. Now it seems mostly back to 1 lb.
My reaction to the headline is that the article is probably dumb and I don't want to read it, because the implication is that there is a new trend which will go on indefinitely until every food product is like a teaspoon.
If the article was like, here's an interesting way in which economics and psychology interact to produce a discontinuous behavior in the marketplace, I'd be more positive.
In other words, I have the same sour reaction as to most stuff these days - I hate journalism, clickbait, and ad-tech.
> Still, in the end, Dworsky says that the sneakiness, and the sense that companies have a low opinion of their customers' intelligence, is what gets to him most. Over his years as a professional observer of grocery shelves, he has noticed an interesting pattern: it is common for a downsized product to come full circle. First a product drops from 16oz to 14.5oz. Then, as the years pass, maybe it goes down to 11oz. Perhaps it even drops to 8oz. Then, a 16oz size appears again. But this time, it's the super or mega size. And the cost is much, much higher than that of the original.
It's obviously not literally true, though. That's what I find irritating, the exaggeration and the tone, and I think it confirms that my prejudice was exactly right.
The cycle does not take a huge amount of time, and if it was extreme as people pretend, then we would know it because of inflation rates, and we would all be buying super-ultra-mega sizes of everything. And it's not a low opinion of peoples' intelligence, it's a recognition that people are sensitive to price increases for unchanged products. It's directly dictated by what people feel is fair.
I wish we could have articles that don't have the tone of feeding a persecution complex.
My fruit and veg us definitely smaller. We've started ordering from a local supplier, and the onions, carrots, celery, Aubergines, garlic, and herbs are all probably 30% bigger, smell better and taste better too
While skimming the article I realized that fortunately I'm not buying any of these "foods". Moreover, in my country the law requires specifying the price per unit using common unit for all products, and I often make use of this information.
The situation with Japan is likely a bit different given the extremely high population densities and the sheer number of convenience stores (and consequently, the high turnover they likely experience). Additionally, they have consumers who are used to buying food like that at convenience stores which doesn't seem to be the case with Americans. The price points of fresh food in American convenience stores are much worse, leading to a self fulfilling prophesy where people are less likely to try convenience store food, making it hard to ever reach the economies of scale required to make the price reduction possible that would make it pervasive in American life
Absolutely there are cultural issues at play, not just the 7/11 overlords trying to make us sick. Certainly snapping my fingers and forcing US convenience stores to sell cucumbers would just drive stores out of business.
To me it's more a point about what could be possible once we wake up from our great nap. That we aren't damned to donuts in our convenience stores at the species level, just a cultural one, thus it can change for the better (hard to image it getting worse).
Many fruits and vegetables have a waste component that nobody eats, but is necessary for the things to grow. Think banana/orange peels, carrot tops, or the vegetable placenta of a bell pepper. If you pay by unit weight for those things, and they're getting smaller, you're getting less of the edible component but still plenty of the wasted bits. You can think of it as relatively constant packaging overhead.
I can't say I've noticed any of my organic produce getting smaller though.
Banana peels and bell pepper placenta compost, orange peels can be candied and zested, and carrot tops go into the pot for vegetable broth and _then_ are composted. There's a lot to reduce / reuse / reanimate [1] in your fresh produce's "packaging".
This theme always reminds me of the story Joel Spolsky related about optimizing the number of sesame seeds on a burger bun [0]. It may work for a while, but there is a logical lower limit to how small an ice cream container can be before it becomes a pint (e.g. pint plus 1/32 oz?). But that is always the next guy's problem, I suppose.
Well, I stopped buying Haagen-Dazs when their tubs shrank and stuck to Ben & Jerry instead. And I stopped buying Tropicana Orange Juice when they shrank their juice containers from 64 fl. oz. to 59. You can't fool all of the people all the time.
you've struck upon an excellent idea. if we just make the units even less sensible then they are now, then no one will be even tempted to do the arithmetic
My favorite example of this in Canada is a brand of butter that is shaped/looks exactly like a standard pound of butter when it sits on the shelf... but when you pick it up it's actually half a pound of butter... as it's only half as thick as you would expect it to be.
It's usually priced higher than your average stick of butter as well.
I picked one up once, laughed, and have actively avoided looking at that brand ever since.
It's been on the shelf for years now though so they must be making good money?
I make my own yogurt, my own ice-cream and maintain a wild-yeast culture for making sourdough. I roast my coffee in a popcorn popper for espresso. I make my own cookies, cakes, spice mixes, jam from raspberries on the back-yard and even some cleaning products. Sometimes I churn my butter.
But, still, found this article disturbing. I can't make my own toilet paper, milk or cream (for the ice-cream). We need some more creative destruction on the economy.
Back in the 90s when I was studying computer graphics I checked out a textbook on statistics and data visualization from the local library. I don't remember the year it was published, but it was one of those old hardcover books with browning coarse paper pages and a dark linen lining on the exterior.
It was full of real world, hand-drawn visualizations, and one of the economic examples plotted Hersheys chocolate bar size per year across over a decade, with some other economic factor, GDP or some such. The text went a bit off on a tangent describing how the price of the bar stayed relatively constant but its volume varied in lockstep with the economy.
I doubt you could use the Hersheys bar today as an economic barometer since we have so much variety on the store shelves. Back then there was just one Hersheys bar... but they seem to have always manipulated its size over its price.
I do the same. I'm in Sweden. There's old school pre-EU-legislation for price labels to have show a comparison price like that here. I've always assumed this came out of the consumer-empowerment-movement in the 70s, here. Is there a similar thing in the rest of the EU? Perhaps this is left to the member countries?
Given enough time, customers will eventually exit the market. Ex: I have completely stopped buying processed cereal (Cheerios etc) in favor of natural oatmeal.
I have a 40lb bag of oatmeal at home that will last 4 months. Also much healthier.
When I see tiny cereal boxes on a store shelf...I shake my head.
When I lived alone I ate a lot of convenience food and pre-made sauces and such, then I moved in with my partner and she cooks everything from scratch (she's same age as me and Hungarian so she grew up under communism-lite where having your own animals and veg/fruit gardens was common if you lived in the country).
Honestly I'd forgotten how good basic food tastes when it's cooked fresh - she makes simple things like mashed potato amazing and she bakes a lot as well - she wastes no food, left-overs are used up as lunch or frozen.
The really stupid part of all this from my point of view was that our combined food bill from raw ingredients is about the same as what I was paying living alone.
My partner can get 3 meals for 3 of us out of a single chicken.
She also buys the 'cheaper' parts like Chicken thighs and then slow cooks them to utter perfection, with a few herbs and veggies it is sublime.
I honestly though since I 'cooked' I was been economical but things like spaghetti bolognaise jars of sauce added 30% to the cost of a meal compared to the way she does it.
I always thought cake pops were the ultimate expression of this idea about the smaller dessert.
Here is a single bite of cake.
(They sell them at Starbucks, I don't know how much of a thing they are anywhere else. Actually I just realized I see the same idea in several restaurants with fancy little desserys in shot glasses. Still $6.50 for that one or two bites though.
I wonder if this shrinkage skews cost of living indices to any relevant degree. Changes to individual products may not amount to much money lost, but I could see them adding up in a non-trivial way that flies under the radar for most researchers.
Either the value makes sense to you at the point of purchase or it doesn't. What does it matter to anyone what it used to cost yesterday? This isn't yesterday and you aren't being offered the product at yesterday's price, so forget about what happened yesterday. Take the current price or leave it.
The article talks about 'sneakiness'. I don't get it. Are they lying about the volume or weight of the product? No? So what on earth is the problem? Sometimes prices go up, sometimes they go down. It's not some secret conspiracy. Prices fluctuate, world markets and supply conditions change, labour prices change. Does he think it's the job of a manufacturer of ice cream to protect him from the sands of time?
And for some of the examples in the article... do people really need larger servings of 'fruit loops' of all things? Come on.
Is it that you don't understand what the problem is, or that it makes you uncomfortable to look at the problem? Let me phrase a few questions that help me think about what I think the problem is in a few ways:
- Do you think it's necessary or unnecessary for American regulations on advertising to exist?
- Do you think it ought to be punished for products to be packaged in a deceptive manner as long as it's theoretically possible to see the base information to make a determination about the product?
- Do you think that manufacturers that sell high purity goods can survive against those that diluted purity goods loaded with adulterants while concealing that and winning marketshare on volume?
I don't think any situation described in this article is deceptive.
I think it's up to the consumer to pick purity that meets their needs. I'm not really sure how pure 'fruit loops' can be though so I'm not sure that's relevant here.
In summary, there's no moral issue here. The price by weight or volume of every product is accessible to the consumer, and they can judge the quality of the product on their own.
And anyway a half gallon of ice cream is an absolutely obscene quantity, and it's a good thing producers are packaging things in more reasonable sizes.
> I think it's up to the consumer to pick purity that meets their needs.
This isn't legal for pharmaceuticals, for instance. And if this were true, what is the point of the FDA? Why was the act established in the first place, why does the administration exist? What makes food, which is just as consumable (and can also have a significant impact on one's body), any different from drugs? I think that there is a reason the act's name is called the "Pure Food And Drug Act" -- emphasis on the world "pure".
There's no indication in the article that any of the products have an illegal impurity is there? Some of them have a different purity level, which may not be what you want, but someone else might be happy with at that price point. If the purity of your old brand doesn't work for you, buy a different one instead.
Normally there are regulations about what you can and can't put in a food product. For example chocolate often has to contain a certain percentage of cocoa solids.
But again this isn't what this article is about. This article is about food products being smaller than he'd like and in some cases less pure than he'd like. Not illegal small or illegally impure. He should just pick another product if they don't meet his requirements. He thinks he's exposing some kind of conspiracy, when really it's market prices and tastes changing.
> Normally there are regulations about what you can and can't put in a food product. For example chocolate often has to contain a certain percentage of cocoa solids.
I hear you, but that's not exactly what I'm asking. I'm asking a more specific question: how does a thing, previously legal, comes to be illegal? What happens at a societal and legislative level for such a change to transpire?
Are you asking me how legislation works? I'm not an expert on how it works in your country but you can often look up YouTube videos online if you want.
No. Laws do not exist a priori. They are constructed by the human society that forms structures and mechanisms to create them. I am asking you _why_ legislation comes into existence. In this specific case, I am asking you _why_ the Pure Food And Drug Act came into existence. Do you know the history?
Now we are getting somewhere. Yes, dangerous impurity -- that is part of it. But the act also prohibits selling "misbranded or adulterated" food or drugs. For the purpose of food, the act defines "misbranded" as:
```
First. If it be an imitation of or offered,for sale under the distinctive name of another article .
Second. If it be labeled or branded so as to deceive or mislead the
purchaser, or purport to be a foreign product when not so, or if the
contents of the package as originally put up shall have been removed
in whole or in part and other contents shall have been placed in such
package, or if it fail to bear a statement on the label of the quantity
or proportion of any morphine, opium, cocaine, heroin, alpha or beta
eucane, chloroform, cannabis indica, chloral hydrate, or teetanilide,
or any derivative or preparation of any of such substances contained
therein .
```
Key points here:
1. "If it be labeled or branded so as to deceive or mislead the
purchaser"
2. "if the
contents of the package as originally put up shall have been removed
in whole or in part and other contents shall have been placed in such
package"
If you did indeed make the assumption that the point of the act was to limit and only limit dangerous impurity, then I think it's important to challenge that, because it seems to be an error by omission. The full text of the act clearly references not just dangerous impurities, but the whole spirit of deceptive dilution of purity with filler.
And this is why I think it's important to know the history behind it as well. The act did not fall from the sky. It was not merely a matter of people dropping dead from poisonous adulterated products. There was a broader spectrum of adulteration, from lethal danger to deceptive but unlikely to be dangerous to anything but your pocketbook. And either way, there was a national uproar about it, and people had decided they'd had enough with it and they pressured legislature for redress. There is a reason that said legislature didn't just stop at prohibiting dangerous impurities, and that is because there wasn't just an element of physical grievance, but moral grievance as well. I think that arguments which presume that the market itself is a good enough mechanism end up missing this element of the act.
The act was set up not just to protect consumers from physical danger, but to protect society from dishonest, anti-consumer business tactics which are intended to deceive. It is the latter part which I believe your argument misses.
To keep using the same packaging? I don't know. I don't care either. They're free to sell in any size box they want as far as I'm concerned, and they don't need to explain it to anyone. I buy by volume or weight. I also accept that it's natural in our economy that prices will fluctuate and don't blame it on manufacturers.
This article is frustrating because the onus is not directly on the manufacturing... consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition. But who can blame them, we have entire governments building pyramids to suit questionably beneficial food industries. Where does all that corn come from for our addiction to high fructose corn syrup?
Stop letting people and companies who do not care about YOU, feed you and your family.