| Citing tough times, Haagen-Dazs claims it was forced to downsize its ice cream pints: they will now be 14 ounces instead of 16. But to rival Ben and Jerry’s, a recession (or even depression) is no excuse for less ice cream. The company responded to the news by reassuring its customers: “Now more than ever, you deserve your full pint of ice cream.” No word yet on whether any gas stations will try to pass off three quarts as a gallon … [%comments]
The Pint-Size Recession
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I remember reading something that said bakers had tried the same thing at some point in history and that’s why we now have “a bakers dozen”. If I remember correctly it indicated that to try to save money, or make more money, they would sell the baked goods in a dozen but started decreasing the size of the goods them selves. I wonder how long until we start seeing things like that. Popsicles that are slightly shorter, a sandwich with fewer slices of meat, a glass of soda that’s not quite full. All in the name of saving a few cents per customer, over the span of thousands of customers.
How about the shrinking bag of coffee? Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Green Mountain, etc., have all “downsized” their ground coffee containers from 16oz to 12oz and now I’m finding some at 10oz!
That’s why I go to my favorite bagel shop (here in Lakewood, CO) and buy a full 16 OUNCE bag of Scottish Roasters coffee for the same price as the big-name 10-12oz bags.
As long as bars don’t try to pull this trick everything will be OK
….weren’t we just reading about how the price of milk and other commodities has plummeted? Hagen Dazs’ claims don’t sound legitimate.
@Steven (#1): Actually a baker’s dozen is the opposite phenomenon: it’s when the baker gives you an extra roll with your dozen.
http://www.bartleby.com/59/4/bakersdozen.html
It’s nothing to do with ‘tough times’, it’s just a way to mask a price increase. It was pretty obvious recently when the makers of my ice cream of choice shrank their containers from 1.75 qt to 1.5 qt. And I’m sure at some point that container was half a gallon…
The popular phrase for this nonsense from one of my other favorite blogs, The Consumerist, is “Grocery Shrink Ray”.
There was a long string of entries about the sizes of just about anything you can think of going down in a not so obvious way while the price remained the same. For example, I noticed my can of tuna is now 5 ounces when it used to be about 7. 7 was OK to make up for lunch and share. 5 is not. Things like this can really mess up recipes.
Haagen-Dazs … now more expensive then ever.
Let’s all just go to Ben & Jerry’s … or cheaper still – the local supermarket.