Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks.
Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.
A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.
I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.
And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).
Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar you used to buy soap costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.
(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target... is pure evil to you.)
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.
(Also linked above)
Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago:
Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.
Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.
On the merits of using a presold mix, you're likely to get a smooth batter with much less stirring effort.
Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
Sales will, in fact, continue to go up as people now have to buy twice the item count to get the same calories.
The Market is not a benevolent magical entity. It is a machine that only has a single variable: profit.
You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients.
Maybe people will start doing that?
Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.
Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate...
Costs $50 to do a batch tho.
Oh wait you probably have all of them already.
Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Because you value convenience?
Honestly, what a silly take. The world thrives on convenience products.
He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.
The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!
Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
AfterHIA•1h ago