… posted a photo on social media of the 62.5g bar alongside one of today’s Mars Bars, which is 40g.
“Over the last 35 years, we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand, alongside considering wider external factors such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa.”
I’m sure your customers have been demanding smaller bars that cost more.
“We didn’t only shrink the size, we also lowered the quality of ingredients to maximize profits!”
The only people who enjoy Mars bars are shareholders
There’s a large number of people talking glp-1s (ozempic et. al) and they actually are looking for smaller portion sizes, which is driving a huge trend in grocery now of boxing up larger quantities of smaller items.
Of course the industry has used this to their advantage. Instead of just offering a 4-pack of frozen dairy treats at 2 oz each, they can offer an 8-pack at .8 oz each (less total product) and sell it alongside that one for even more, and they actually will sell more of the 8-pack.
Yes, because shrinkflation wasn’t a thing until Ozempic arrived.
Also, the % of the population taking Ozempic is what, a rounding error?
I’m sure your customers have been demanding smaller bars that cost more.
Well, their customers have kept on buying their products so clearly they don’t care too much.
Their customers would take bars that cost the same and are imperceptibly smaller. Or, at least, would take it better than a price hike, I’d expect. Then, the Karens would come out.
If people weren’t buying more of them, they wouldn’t’ve changed the size.
What people say they want and what they actually purchase are often different.
edit: Yet again, Lemmy proves ignorance is rampant and people have absolutely no concept of the real world.
Companies have been trying to cheap out in manufacturing costd since manufacturing was invented.
Don’t blame the consumer when the candy bar cartel shrinks their shit then lies about it.
Me: doesn’t buy them
Candy: shrinks anyway
Me: “but the internet says that won’t happen!”
If people weren’t buying more of them, they wouldn’t’ve changed the size.
That’s not a valid conclusion.
The only thing that we can say for sure is that the companies benefit from shrinkflation in some way otherwise they wouldn’t do it.
If sales drop due to the smaller sizes but they still make more profit overall then you can be sure that we’d be getting smaller bars.
The only thing that we can say for sure is that the companies benefit from shrinkflation in some way otherwise they wouldn’t do it.
Nitpick, even though I agree with you: companies believe they will benefit. We can’t rule out how fucking stupid a lot of management types are. Like whatever company fired people for AI and then had to retire them, plus eat the lost potential from fucking around with AI for months.
And even when the individuals aren’t stupid, the incentives are fucked. Google kills products because of internal fighting for promotions and recognition, not anything that’s good for users or the companies.
You are assuming both options were on the market for consumers to choose from.
These are unilateral decisions.
I always skip the smaller bags of chips in favor of the biggest ones available. Same goes for Little Debbie’s offerings.
I am making no such assumption, and you clearly do not know how businesses operate.
I’m not fond of much of what they do, but I’m speaking in realities, not idealations.
You “make no such assumptions” of whether both sizes were available in 1991, but you do assume that the user has no idea how businesses operate. You’re not speaking in reality at all, you’re just arguing nonsensically
Are you 15? Or do you just lack all common sense and ability to understand the universe around you?
I’m serious. What you’ve written is so far from reality that I feel compelled to make sure you’re OK and not like, IDK, stroking out somewhere.
Factoring in 35 years of inflation. A $0.50 mars bar in 1991 is $1.21 today. The cost of a Mars bar today is at least $1.50 USD (after converting from UK pounds) and that’s being generous.
Companies are greedier than ever and there seems to be no stopping it (meaning because of the oligarchy in the US, Congress will never do a damn thing about it, and certainly the spoiled man-baby’s executive branch will do nothing about it), and no end in sight of it.
Fuck them all.
I would also be surprised if the cost of production, now using cheaper ingredients and far more automation, hadn’t also decreased.
Oh absolutely. Productivity has increased drastically since the 90s but wages never kept up.
Don’t say it in cop voice. Say:
workers engineers and scientists made everything drastically more productive and the pedophiles stole all the gains. We keep letting them.
We’re saying the same thing. The productivity surplus is getting stolen by the Epstein class. I’m not trying to sugarcoat anything.
I know. You were trained to say it in a way that contains linguistic ‘outs’ for boot lickers and disattributes the harm. Read back my post and look at the formatting.
I visited a chocolate confection assembly plant. The only things humans do now is random tasks like flip the random bar that for some reason fell odd onto conveyor or shift the skewed box on the pallet, or open the door for a shipment.
The rest was automatic, from the pipes running chocolate throughout the plant to the final gluing and boxing.
The costs are materials, and the factory operation cost, labour is almost nothing. So to increase profit they really can only cheapen or lesson the materials
Not to mention less cacao
Does infinite growth mean eternal shrinkflation? Will it ever plateau? Or collapse?
In 1991 those were closer to 30 cents.
I was 12, so I didn’t have 3 cents to rub together, let alone 30. I assumed it was similar to candy bars when I was in high school, which were about $0.50 at the time.
I was only like 9, but I remember that shit. Lol.
Least those were the prices here in the Midwest. Thirtyish cent candy bars, 25 cent bags of small chips, 35 cent cans of coca cola, 59 cents for a 20 ounce. If hamburger was a dollar a pound, it’s because it wasn’t on sale that week.
We’ve had the technology to stop this since 1791. Arguments about maturity could be made that put an industrial version as late as 1917.
That’s still over a century ago.
That’s the official inflation numbers, which are lies. It’s an open secret that in the 90s there was a political movement among the owners to artificially lower reported inflation (see: Boskin Commission for example) because it would boost the economy (on paper) while letting them absorb the gains.
Underreporting by 1-2% a year doesn’t seem like much until you do it for several decades. Looking at actual inflation instead of the reported lie, that mars bar is closer to $2 today. Shrinkflation had to happen to keep the bigger con going. Most businesses will, of course, cheat the margins at every instance.
TLDR; shrinkflation is a symptom, not the disease
Even the font weight shrank
Also, recipe blogs are a great source of information on shrinkflation. Going to the store to look for a package size that no longer exists is fun.
I walked through some forest 2ish years ago, next to a football stadium
I found a snickers wrapper with “olympics atlanta 1996” next to the snickers logo
Aww man, that was 10 years ago
Sorry to make you feel old, but it was in fact 20 years ago!
Got some bad news, y’all. I was born in 1996 and Im
3010 years oldThere’s a question to give a judge an aneurysm. How do age of consent laws work when time machines are involved?
Enshittification is the word of the decade. Century?
I’d sign for enshittification being the worst thing that happens this century. Considering there are years 73 ahead of us in the century, it might only be the precursor of what will actually be the word of the century.
Global warming is by far the worst thing but it leads to the same evil root of corporate greed.
I think fascism is worse. I think Russia invading Ukraine is worse. I think the genocide by Israel of the Palestinians is worse. I think wealth inequality is worse. I think the lack of social safety nets in the US, especially universal heatlh case, is worse.
Enshittification is bad, but I really don’t think it’s the worst thing.
enshittification is the symptom of the underlying issue
I mean the wealth inequality is sorta what drives it all.
I could be wrong, but I believe the person to whom you replied was indicating that they would be okay with “enshittification” being the word of the century, because there are SO MANY worse things on the horizon or actively festering and spiraling out of control that, if “enshittification” is the worst thing to happen this century, that would be an acceptable outcome. I believe they were using “sign for” as in “to accept, as of a package or parcel”
Thanks, this I meant. And also, let’s hope it ends with enshittification and that it does not lead to hostile corporations sucking the world dry.
Probably something like “Omnicide”, the way things are going.
And using it to describe everything is the enshitification of the word enshitification
enshittification is the new woke
woke and sheeple
Not when literally everything is enshittifiying.
If its the word of the millenium Im very curious where it goes…
I always had the feeling that they were 56% bigger when I was a kid.
You were just smaller then.
Soon it’s just ars.
WRONG. It’ll be just the one Mar.
2087: a
I’m curious to see how different the ingredient lists are between the two.
The chocolate was thicker too. Easier to peel off and eat separately.
Even the font got skinnier!
Back in the dialup days when brands were first coming online I used to have quite a thing for a Toffee Crisp. When I got a bar that was noticeably smaller than the last, I emailed them expecting a reply about market forces or cost of ingredients, but maybe they’d also send a voucher for a free bar or something.
Instead they tried to gaslight me, telling me they’d always been that size and that I must be imagining it. I was so put out by it that, other than a very occasional multi-pack for picnics, I haven’t bought a single-serve Toffee Crisp, Mars Bar, Snickers etc since.
When shrinkflation became a recognised term I felt so vindicated! I wish I still had that email so that I could shove it in their faces.
I saw a Curly Wurly in a shop the other day, and they’re now a pale imitation of what they were.
Even the design looks better!!! Why!?
I clearly remember they were 68 grams when I was a kid, which always weighed on my mind when I had to choose between a Mars bar and the 78 gram Oh Henry
I’ve never actually had one. They haven’t sold these in the US in years.
Mars bars are sold in the US under the name Milky Way. Not to be confused with what’s globally known as Milky Way, which is called 3 Musketeers in the US.
um. the us had mars bars and they were nothing like milky ways. they were closer to snickers but with almonds.
Yeah those are called Snickers Almond in the US now. Either way, whether they want a UK Mars bar like in the article or they want a pre-2003 US Mars bar, you can just buy the same thing with a different name in the US.
Yeah but Milky Ways are sold under the name Mars in other countries. Whereas Milky Way doesn’t have any of the caramel in other countries.
Like soccer vs football 🤣
No mars bars at all?
