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Here We Downsize Again – Summer 2021 (Part 1)

As inflation rears its ugly head, manufacturers have to decide whether they will raise prices, shrink their products, or possibly even do both. With so much publicity about “shrinkflation” over the past month, more shoppers are finding new examples. We have our ace downsizing sleuth, Richard G., to thank for spotting the items below, which you may find changing on store shelves right now.

General Mills Family Size Cereals

General Mills has gone overboard in the past few weeks downsizing variety after variety of their popular brands of breakfast cereals.

General Mills cerealsClick picture above, then again to enlarge to see net weights

cheerios

*MOUSE PRINT:

One example is Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. The 20.1 ounce box got half an inch taller, but lost 1.1 ounces making it 19 ounces now. That is a loss of one bowl of cereal in each box — the equivalent of a 27 cent price increase. (The packages shown were all on sale for $3.99.) The other brands shown were reduced between 0.5 ounces and 1.2 ounces. Think how much General Mills is saving when you multiply that times millions or tens of millions of boxes.


Gold Peak Tea

Coca Cola, which owns the Gold Peak tea brand, is in the process of downsizing their bottles from half a gallon (64 oz.) to just 59 ounces. Both bottles were on sale for $2.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Gold Peak Tea


Scott Shop Towels

These paper towels that are sold at hardware and auto supply stores have changed also. But look at the pictures. They both have 55 towels per roll (at an outrageous price of $3.99 each). So what’s going on here?

*MOUSE PRINT:

Scott shop towels

Scott lopped off one inch from each sheet, so instead of each one being 10.4 inches long, the new ones are only 9.4 inches. That’s a loss of about four-and-a-half feet of paper towels per roll.


If you find an item that has been downsized, please try to take a sharp picture of the old and new packages and email them to Edgar (at symbol) MousePrint.org . Thanks.

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8 thoughts on “Here We Downsize Again – Summer 2021 (Part 1)”

    • And it is all going back to the stores from which they came after all the shrinkflation publicity dies down.

      • Will they actually take it back? My wife tried to return some food that had gone bad before the “best buy” date and the two stores told her they weren’t taking returns due to COVID-19. It’s not like they were going to put bad food back on the shelf. But now they have a good excuse to refuse returns.

        Edgar replies: No issues on returning this stuff here at multiple stores.

  1. General Mills making excellent quarterly/yearly profits for 2020 and the downsizing begins. The main or second ingredient is sugar so it’s cheaper to grab a 4lb bag of sugar from the local Walmart, dig out a spoon, and enjoy.

    • Scott… Interestingly, most of the cereals pictured have 12 grams of sugar in a one cup serving. That is three teaspoons. Would you ever dump that much sugar into a bowl of unsweetened anything?

  2. Processed unhealthy garbage directed to children for a lifetime habit. Adult health issues, here we come. It all should be down-sized from the weekly shopping list. How about something like old-fashion oatmeal (and not the flavored instant stuff) with some fresh berries?

  3. I’ve had to steer away from such sugary cereals and focus more on bran, wheat, and rice. Some of the box sizes these companies come up with in an attempt to hide their downsizing is pretty incredible. The new boxes are obviously designed to look just as tall.

    Also special shout out to Coca-Cola who made sure to completely redesign the entire bottle to try to hide their almost 10% savings in product per bottle. Sad to see Gold Peak go the way of orange juice. I swear if a big company like Coke owned a milk brand we’d all be pouring from 3.6 qt containers.

    • Well Joel they do own the Simply Orange Orange Juice brand and we all know that orange juice used to be in 64oz containers and have dropped down to 52oz containers.

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