The grocery shrink ray is a phenomenon that you may have noticed, where companies make their packaged products slightly smaller, charge the same price, and hope that no one notices. It’s not a new phenomenon, but the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom recently tallied up shrunken products in the last five years. [More]
united kingdom
United Kingdom Discovers 2,529 Products Hit By Grocery Shrink Ray, Calls It ‘Shrinkflation’
By 7.28.17
Rising Olive Oil Prices In Europe May Catch Up With Us Eventually
By 2.9.17
Olive oil is a kitchen staple, used for everything from cooking up veggies to delicately dipping pieces of bread. It’s also becoming a more expensive staple due to weather in olive-growing countries Spain, Italy, and Greece. Hot weather, fruit flies, and flooding across those regions mean a much smaller harvest. [More]
Live The Dream: Buy Your Own Doomsday Bunker In Northern Ireland
By 2.4.16
In Northern Ireland, northeast of Belfast, the country built a massive underground bunker big enough to hold 235 people. It was meant for the country’s elite to shelter themselves in the event of nuclear war. Its existence was only made public in 2007, and the government has decided to get rid of it. There’s a problem, though: it’s easy enough to sell government surplus filing cabinets or tanks, but what’s the market for 46,363 square feet of blastproof and windowless real estate? [More]
Amazon Marketplace Glitch Brings Early Christmas To Shoppers, Nightmare For Sellers
By 12.15.14
Every once in a while a company will suffer an online glitch that leads to consumers purchasing items at bargain-basement prices. While most of the recent buying free-for-alls came courtesy of deeply discounted airline tickets, an issue on Amazon’s UK marketplace Friday gave new meaning to the idea of a holiday fire sale when thousands of items went were priced for a little as one penny (or 2 pennies if you’re in the United States). [More]
Retailer Forgets To Check The News, Sends Email Welcoming An Independent Scotland
By 9.19.14
The staff over at Made.com in the United Kingdom were apparently up too late glued to the TV last night to see whether or not Scotland voted to become a separate country. Because while Scotland decided to stay in the UK, a marketing email sent bright and early this morning welcomed a new country to its rolls — Scotland. Well, this is awkward. [More]
KFC Customer Claims His Dinner Has Foretold The Outcome Of Scotland’s Independence Vote
By 9.17.14
While the United Kingdom stands poised on the brink of a possibly fractured future, one man says he already knows the outcome of Scotland’s vote on independence: It’s going solo, according to a piece of chicken he bought from KFC. Well, that’s decided. [More]
The Nigerian Prince E-Mail Scam Is Actually 200 Years Old
By 11.6.13
E-mail is an invention of the last few decades, but scamming people? That’s an ancient calling. What you may not know when you toss those advance fee scam e-mails into your spam folder is that the senders are taking part in an old, old scam that dates back to the early 19th century. [More]
If An Airline Passenger Must Buy Two Seats, Don’t Put Them In Different Rows
By 10.15.13
It’s understandable when airlines force passengers to buy two seats if they can’t fit in a single one. It’s less understandable when the airline puts those two seats in different rows. That just means extra embarrassment for the passenger when front-line employees don’t understand the company’s own policies. Yet this is what a man from Wales claims happened to him during a flight to Ireland. [More]
Pizza Hut’s Cheeseburger-Stuffed Crust Menace Spreads To United Kingdom
By 9.18.13
Almost a year and a half ago, the unholy spawn of a pizza and a platter of cheeseburger sliders arrived in Pizza Hut outlets in the Middle East. It’s a stuffed-crust pizza, but with little mozzarella-topped burgers embedded in the crust. The whole thing looks like a grease-filled sunflower. [More]
U.K. Health Officials Find “Beef” Lasagna Meals Containing 60%-100% Horse Meat
By 2.8.13
Our neighbors across the pond are caught in an equine-lover’s nightmare: First, beef hamburgers on shelves were found to contain horse DNA and recalled, after authorities traced the contamination back to a couple processing plants. Burger King got caught up in it as well, although no burgers with horse in them made it to stores. And now the scandal has spread to frozen “beef” lasagna meals. [More]
Two London Residents Find Dead Frogs In Their Tesco Spinach
By 9.19.12
We’ve come to use the tag “free frogs” for any story about unexpected dead animals in one’s food. Over in the United Kingdom, they’re apparently running some kind of regional free-frog promotion. Two London customers of chain retailer Tesco have found dead frogs in their spinach in the last week. [More]
