A while back, I complained somewhere here about the unannounced reduction of the number of pepperoni slices on my frozen french bread pizza. It saddens me to report that this trend of shortchanging the consumer (i.e.: me), continues unabated. This is nothing new of course, but it is hitting new lows.
Breakfast cereals used to be my main fixation. The boxes they sell today are a shadow of the behemoths we used to have when I was a kid. Back then, you could actually get the box to stand up in front of you while you ate. Now, some of the boxes are so thin, they teeter like thin books on the grocery store shelves. I’ve actually seen cereal boxes fall off the shelves just because someone happened to walk by.
Another one that bugs me is cranberry sauce. I noticed a couple of years ago that they were stuffing cranberry sauce into smaller cans. This turned up around Thanksgiving, which is about the only time most normal people buy cranberry sauce.
The can looked like one of those toy canned goods that comes with a child’s play-set. When I first saw this, it took a few minutes to register. I stared at it in disbelief, letting my resentment grow and then I bought the normal sized store brand instead.
Apparently, the National Brand did not pick up on the bad vibes I was sending their way. Instead of caving to my silent protest by reverting to the old size can, the store brand has also reduced the size of their can as well. Now, every Thanksgiving I cave and buy the toy sized can. And every Thanksgiving dinner, the smaller portion of cranberry sauce sits there on the table, silently mocking me.
At least with something like shrinking cereal boxes or a cans of cranberry sauce, you know what you’re getting into before you buy it.
The trouble is, it’s not always the packaging that shrinks. Sometimes they just put less inside a “normal” size package. Potato chip companies are famous for this. When you open a bag of potato chips, you need to keep a flashlight handy so you can find the chips down in the bag. The potato chip manufacturers try to blame it on “settling”, and even put a disclaimer on the bag. But the thing is, I never seem to buy a bag that’s “unsettled”.
Years ago, I used to buy Brown and Serve sausages about once a month or so. One day when I was putting away the groceries, I noticed that the sausages were rattling around in the box. When I opened the box, I found that, while there were still ten of those meat-like tubers in the box, they were no longer tucked snugly inside. Now there was room to spare.
Apparently the sausage company had recalibrated whatever disgusting apparatus they use to squeeze these things out of, and they were making them smaller- thus reducing the weight of the package by a more profitable 1.5 ounces. In protest, I now only buy these sausages about once every other month.
As bad as all of these others are, the worst came the other day.
The other day, I decided to swing by Walmart and pick up another mega-pack of toilet paper. I've been getting the same, industrial strength brand, in the same giant-sized package, for years. I long ago stopped bothering to read the label. So, like always, I ran in, grabbed what I needed, and I went home.
A few days later, I was putting a new roll in the bathroom and I thought there was something different about it. Sure enough, the next time I went to rip off my usual thirty or forty sheets, the roll was flopping around on the holder. Turns out that while the outside of the roll was the same size, they were wrapping the paper around a bigger paper tube- thereby cheating me out of my rightful allotment of toilet paper.
Here you see proof of Corporate America once again screwing me over. Notice the difference in size between the old, “normal” size paper tube on the left and the new, “Let’s Give The CEO a Raise” sized paper tube on the right. Can a corporation stoop any lower? I think not!
I can deal with getting cheated out of food or other necessities. Heck, I almost expect it. But this is a new low. I take this personally. This directly, and negatively, impacts my lifestyle.
