Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

Based.

I would LOVE to see more of this. Looking at you GATORADE, with your half-inch-deep plastic rim on the bottom and new hourglass bottle shape. 32oz sized bottles are 28oz now and MORE expensive. Fuck shrinkflation to death.

If only smart glass is as popular as mobile phones. When Google introduced their smart glass, I dreamt of a day when a price history overlay is displayed when looking at a barcode, like how Keepa is doing for Amazon.

I also like German price display which has effective price, as in Eur per liter for drinks, making it dead simple to compare products. A smart glass will make it available everywhere.

Back to Carrefour, I really like that they are pushing pro consumer actions. However, we all know too well that they won't do the same when it's their products which are shrinking. Still better than no action though.

I'd love to see this naming and shaming becoming a standard. I want to know if the product I'm buying has changed and while I try to do this myself, it can be tricky to keep track of all the products I buy and it's not like I'm scanning the exact weight every time and memorizing it, just that it's generally the same weight. These scumbag companies are always trying to sneak by all these changes over time, it's great to finally get a spotlight shining on it. If some sort of legislation can be made to force companies to note changes in products made in the last 6 months on the label, that would be great.

Man, the French really don't fuck around, do they?

Though the article says that Carrefour themselves do it for their house brands, so does that mean they'll also apply it to themselves? XD

Carrefour are fucking thieves and their own low-price brands are also shrinkflationated carcinogenic crap.

They don't really have anything to teach.

It appears to be in some mystic arcane language but I have been able to translate it:

This product has seen its liters

REDUCED

and the price charged by our supplier

INCREASE

WE COMMIT TO RENEGOTIATING THIS RATE

don't forget the price in retail include the destruction cost. they are winning on both side.

I know only one case where this shrinkflation thing was stopped - one beer company decided to sell 0.4l cans, because "that's what the customers want". It turned out pretty fast that wasn't what their customers wanted :)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The French supermarket chain Carrefour has put labels on its shelves this week warning shoppers of “shrinkflation”, the phenomenon where manufacturers reduce pack sizes rather than increase prices.

It has slapped price warnings on products from Lindt chocolates to Lipton iced tea to pressure top consumer goods suppliers Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever to tackle the issue in advance of much-anticipated contract talks.

Since Monday, Carrefour has been putting stickers on products that have shrunk in size but cost more even after raw materials prices have eased, to rally consumer support as retailers prepare to face the world’s biggest brands in negotiations due to start soon and end by 15 October.

“Obviously, the aim in stigmatising these products is to be able to tell manufacturers to rethink their pricing policy,” Stefen Bompais, the director of client communications at Carrefour, said in an interview.

The Carrefour chief executive, Alexandre Bompard, who also heads the retail industry lobby group FDC, has repeatedly said consumer goods companies are not cooperating in efforts to cut the price of thousands of staples despite a fall in the cost of raw materials.

In this he is backed by the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, who in June summoned 75 big retailers and consumer groups to his ministry urging them to cut prices.

The original article contains 494 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 56%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Good for them. I made tacos for the first time in ages a couple of days ago, and I could not believe the size of the shells now. I would have called them child-sized, they were so small. It's disgusting.

Geat idea! There's no reason this couldn't be done everywhere by citizens with access to sticker printing services... I've spotted a few products myself in the past year and wouldn't be against sticking some labels on them to warn my fellow shoppers :)

Reduflation

To be fair, most likely of these ‘foods’ look like complete junk. Over-processed shit. Huge mark-ups on what amounts to packaging and cheap fat/sugar/industrial flavours.

fun fact, I was in Taiwan and passed by a Carrefour. Someone mentioned "wow it's such a taiwanese brand". There was a French flag posted directly in front of the main doors!

Shrinkflation is largely a myth. Items do not shrink relative to inflation, in fact the majority of claimed products are larger now than they were 50 years ago.

People often cite certain chocolate bar sizes with comparing the size today to that from the 90s. It's not a fair comparison and not an example of shrinkflation. Mars bars have dropped 20% in size since the 90s but still are 4% larger today then when they originally came out.

Neither are small boxes of cereal. When I worked at Wal-Mart 9 years ago those same thin boxes gave me grief when putting them out on the shelves.

I get it's to shame the brands. But do the French not have unit prices? That's how I determine the better prices among different brands regardless of package size.