Well was that time I went swimming on an extremely cold day...

The price of raw materials and gas is so crazy that it's either this, raise prices outright, or go under. It's not necessarily greed, inflation is really messing things up.

C'mon Chris, how about any canned good? The de-facto standard for canned goods now is 15 to 15.5 ounces in the standard 16 ounce can, the remainder being packed with nitrogen or another inert gas. Ramen noodles in a 3.5oz brick, as opposed to the old 4oz brick. The 99 cent "BigBag" of Frito-Lay products being 2.5 to 4 ounces instead of the original 5 to 6 ounce packages.

Are you sure that it's a means to increase profit as opposed to the entire inflation and a rapidly increasing cost issue? Decrease the size and increase the price a little bit as opposed to keep the same size and be forced to do a larger price increase?

Breyers did it with the their yogurt. They used to be 8oz cups, now they're all 6 oz cups.

With the rising gas prices, I believe you will be seeing more of this behavior from companies in the food industry.

It is much easier to lower the quantity than raise the price.

The marshmallow peeps that I cited in another thread, you only get 2 rows of 5 peeps now instead of the previous years 3 rows of 5, but they still charge the same price. This isn't so bad though because peeps aren't exactly an essential item.

Also the shrinking size of fun-sized halloween candy bars..

canned tuna in water is a key offender. The cans haven't changed size, but there is much less tuna and much more water in the cans than previously.

tampon companies have been notorious for this for well over a decade.

I always read the sizes of products before I buy. Some brands of toilet paper have the same price across the board, but if you read the labels, they vary greatly in square footage. That's what I really care about. More square footage of TP means fewer rolls per house.

Maybe those "savings" are going to pay for the cost of production. With rising fuel costs shipping is eating into profits. How are you supposed to keep the customer happy? If you decrease the amount of the product to keep the price the same, people bitch. If you keep the amount of the product the same, but increase the price, people will bitch. But which group will hurt more? The handful that will notice the decrease in product? Or the group that will notice the price increase?

I've seen this with some beer being 11.2 instead of 12oz bottles.

I understand that companies need to offset their rising expenses. My problem is when they try to be sneaky about it and hide the fact that you're getting less for your money and hope you never notice it. If companies just decided to be up front and say that they have to raise prices a little because of higher expenses I'm sure that while a lot of people wouldn't be happy they'd at least understand. By being sneaky about it like they are I tend to distrust a company more.

I once worked at the M&M/Mars facility (Hackettstown NJ) and in the lobby was an entire display of all their products over the years. You could literally follow an entire product line back 30-40 years and watch the packages get smaller and smaller as time progressed.

Ice cream. Was 64 ounces (i.e. 1/2 gallon), now mostly 56 oz, except for some store brands. Same price, if not more, for a 12-1/2% reduction in product.

They've done it with spaghetti sauce too. Seems most of the jars are 24-26 oz now.

Yogurt. Lots of brands were 8 ounces, now 6.

Propane for gas grills. USED to be 20lb.....then 19...now 18.....

@Git Em SteveDave: Another reason they do this type of thing is to market the lower calories... 100 calorie packs are an easy way to diet so some NON 100 calories foods reduced sizes to brag... and kept prices the same or even raised them for this "convenience." GRRRR!!!

Henry wrote: "I know 2 ounces is not a huge amount of peanut better, but still."

I have a 6 year old who loves PB. It's a big deal. Especially on grocery Friday. When he wants PB&J for school lunch. And the damned jar is empty. A jelly sandwich is NOT the same.

Bastidges! I want names!!!!!

Ya, those heartless buisnesses. Damn profitmongers.

[money.cnn.com]

Read the label. Pay attention. Problem solved. Find something worthwhile to whine about.

@telegramsam:

Tuna fish cans used to be 6.25 (or something just over 6) ounces. Years ago they went to just 6.0 ounces. What did they get rid of? Not the water. Yeah, the tuna. Draining all the extra water is that much tougher when you have less tuna. I haven't bought a can since then.

Cadbury Creme Eggs, but only in the US. In the UK and Canada, they've stayed the same size.

The spaghetti sauces used to be 32 oz. Twelve years ago, I saw them dropping to the 27.5 oz range. Even saw the mix of 28 and 27.5 oz cans/jars of the same item. At the same price. It has nothing to do with fuel, it's about increasing profit without raising the price.

Oh, I'm the Henry who wrote the Skippy Tip in earlier today, i had no idea it would go up!

I am so glad that this is being brought to everyone's attention. I just thought it was me complaining to my friends and family (and they're sick and tired of hearing me). I have here the wrapper to a Scott 1000 sheet roll of TP. Have you noticed that their commmercial about lasting longer hasn't appeared in quite a while? Want to know why? Because while there are still 1,000 sheets, there's no standard as to what a sheet has to measure. So we have to read the labeling (as always) and we see that their sheet is now 4.5" x 3.7". The sheet used to be a 4.5-inch square. So, 1,000 sheets at .8" = 800 inches less, which is 66.67 feet less. I don't know the price of the pack I bought at BJ's, but my guess is that the price went up even as the quantity went down.

As for yogurt, the Colombo brand (it's here in NYC, I don't know if it's nation-wide) is still 8 ounces. They even made a point of reminding us of that fact during a commercial.

Breyers shrunk their ice-cream half-gallon a couple of years ago to the 56 ounce size. So I buy pints of Haagen-Daz instead.

Soup cans went from 19 ounces to 18 ounces, except for some varieties.

I guess for the companies that do this, they think we don't realize it and therefore they are able to pass their "price increase" to us. I want my 7 ounce bag of chips, so just raise the bloody price. The movie's title credits are just about done and so is my 4.25 ounce bag of chips. I guess I'll just have to buy the family size bag. Even though I am a family of one.

Yankee Candle and their Reed Diffuser. When I replaced my old one, I noticed they added some cheap looking stones at the bottom. What I did not notice until my boyfriend pointed it out is that they reduced the fluid ounce. Same price, but now I have some useless stones instead of yummy fragrance.

@Me: Yeah, I'd say a 10% drop is quite significant.

@Aesteval: It's still pretty dishonest to not tell your customers.

Diapers (both baby and adult) and feminine pads (Kotex, fellas) have been reducing in size steadily. Over the past three years, there has been at least 3 downsizings that I've noticed. It's my job to notice these things. Most recently, some sizes of Depends went from 16 to 14 pads, or 28 to 22 -- huge difference!

Girl scout cookies. Those wrappers of thin mints are a good two inches shorter than they were when my sisters where hocking the stuff. Also, when cooking, those shrinking packages of canned goods (oh and let us not forget Jimmy Dean Sausage!) can pose a problem when trying to make some of those old family recipes that merely say things like, two cans of tomato paste. Its hard to decide just how much tomato paste that was when Grandma wrote the recipe down in in 1962.

The solution to all this is a price book: [www.familycorner.com]

It costs whatever a cheap notebook costs you, and saves a surprising amount of money and starts saving you money immediately.

The new Poland spring bottles are 3L, sold at the same price as the 1 gallon(3.79 L) bottles.

@Buran: Seriously? You want hundreds of companies to spend more money telling consumers that, yes, we reduced the quantity so you wouldn't gripe about price increases? Then this money spent on informing consumers would cause even larger decreases in size.

As a few people have tried to note (to no avail apparently) is that inflation continues. The cost of doing business increases. This gives a company 3 choices:

1) Increase prices
2) Decrease quantity
3) Reduce work force
4) Quit doing business

Having worked for a Fortune 500 company and now a small business, I can tell you that nobody wants #3, though it is the easiest way to reduce the cost of doing business. Number 4 is rather counter-productive. That leaves either #1 or #2. People aren't as likely to notice and complain about smaller portion sizes. They will always complain about prices increases being passed on to them.

[quoe]tampon companies have been notorious for this for well over a decade.
[/quote] @MARTHA__JONES:

Seems like a smart idea to piss off women at that time.

A more reasonable direction for your anger isn't business, it's fiscal policy makers who are responsible for devaluing your hard earned money.

I remember opening up a can of pringles a couple of years ago and realizing that the chips shrank...the cans were the same size, but instead of the chips taking up almost the whole diameter of the can, they seemed too small for the can. I forgot to check the weight though, to see if I ended up getting less chip for the same price.

Colombo Yogurt is shrinking from 8oz ---> 6oz soon, just like the rest of the yogurt. The store I work in got a notice about it a few weeks ago, so be prepared.

I think most companies will typically want to stay at the same price point they've always been at, so typically skimping is the only option in order to stay there. Its a sad fact of life. The wisdom is the consumer is typically more made when the 20 oz soda is 1.29 rather than being 16 oz and 99 cents.

I noticed a box of candy (Zours, to be precise), started making 6 ounce boxes instead of 8 ounce, but they tried to disguise the change by having the new box talk about them adding 2 new flavors, so people would notice that instead of the change in size if they saw the new boxes and the old boxes on the same shelf right after the change.

I am addicted to Trident bubblegum. The big long multipacks used to hold 8 individual packs of gum, now they only have 6. And they raised the price from around $1.69 to $2.25--for less gum. Guess I'll start weaning myself off of the stuff.

I work the frozen food department for Safeway and have seen product shrinkage on a few product lines.

**Breyers Ice cream is moving to a 1.5 liter container, down from 1.75. Used to be 1/2 gallon years ago.

**Banquet food bags of frozen chicken tenders are now 26oz bags. Old pack size was 32oz.

**Safeway brand novelties have almost all gone through some kind of product shrink over the last 6 months.

The same story in the TV dinner sections. 1oz or 2oz size reductions of some product lines. For example, the South Beach line was discontinued and replaced with packages of smaller sizes.

I don't really see any solution to this issue. What can the consumer do, other than be aware of these issues? I don't buy large amounts of convenience foods and I generally stick to generics. However, I expect we'll all be seeing this trend.

I've got some gold jewelry to sell and I can cut all unnecessary expenses, and do some container gardening, but we are over a barrel here (an oil barrel) and it's likely to stay that way.

People keep saying that companies do that so that the customer won't see a price increase and thus won't complain. Sounds good in theory but I think most customers are not that attentive to price increases of grocery items. (At this point, I'm sure 90% of the commenters reading this will think "but I pay attention". To which my reply is that people who take time to read and write comments on Consumerist are not a representative sample of the general population.) I would also say that people who are attentive to prices are not easily fooled: they know that what matters is the price per unit (weight, volume, etc.) rather than total price.

But here's the deal: the price per unit is going up whether you like it or not. Whether they raise the per-unit prices or reduce package size, the result is you pay more. And no, I don't think that companies should start sending out memos announcing what they are doing. Keep your eyes open and be savvy.

@SloppyChris:

Amen,bro...

What you folks are seeing is not necessarily greed by these companies. It's the symptoms of rising inflation.In this cut throat marketplace that we call America,they know that unilateral price increases are death...This is much more subtle and easily digested.The companies that are doing this are getting whacked by fuel,energy and other rising costs and something has to give... That said, Fuck you,Breyers. You have taken this to an extreme with your package cutting...

As far as fast food goes, Wendy's has significantly reduced the sizes of their Jr. Cheeseburgers. They originally tried raising the price from 99 cents to $1.25. That didn't fly, so they just reduced the size of the burgers by a third.

A former 25lb bag of Kibbles and Bits is down to 17.6 pounds, and yesterday I saw a 16lb bag. When quantities differ on groceries it makes it hard to comparison shop. Also, with the shrinking packages, I'm not seeing the price-per-unit info on the shelves as was once mandatory. When I do see that info, sometimes the "unit" is the whole package. Reducing the size of the package also disguises inflation, which I assume falsely skews the country's inflation numbers downward.

@MARTHA__JONES: I have a really really funny joke to make but I just can't bring myself to use it. Too offensive even for the internet.

Parkay recently dropped their 16oz margarine to 13oz, but in the same size package. All the cool kids are doing it.

Yeah, I noticed the "more water in tuna" thing, too - solid white albacore has gotten quite a lot less solid recently. My other dietary staple, Morningstar Farms "green boxes", have also had some pretty substantial price increases.

IMHO, part of the solution to rising food prices is to shop more efficiently. Safeway and Giant send us tons of "free shipping on online orders!" codes, so we just wind up buying online. This allows us to plan our purchases more efficiently, buy less junk items, and take more advantage of sales.

You can also, you know, buy less expensive food and cook more. Realistically, most people can cut back in their food budgets by a surprising amount. You don't need meat every night - and I say this as someone who loves good meat.

I hate hidden price increases as much as anyone else, but like others have said, when the underlying ingredients have skyrocketing commodity prices, something has to give. I would have preferred more obvious price hikes, but I also understand that the US market is very price-sensitive - even more so these days. On the plus side, maybe we'll see obesity fall...