Downsizing / Shrinkflation

Here are products that have shrunken in size as a sneaky way for manufacturers to pass on a hidden price increase.

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Kleenex Tissues Downsized

Paper products like toilet paper and paper towels have been downsized frequently. Now tissues are getting smaller too.

*MOUSE PRINT:

kleenex184

Kleenex has narrowed their tissues by two-tenths of an inch, from 8.4 inches wide to 8.2 inches, but the boxes are the same size. That is over 300 square inches less per box.

In addition, an eagle-eyed Mouse Print* reader (MaterialGirl) noticed that on the 120 count boxes the company made each tissue smaller AND reduced the number of tissues in the box to 110:

kleenex120

What does the company have to say about the downsizing?

In recent months, we have been faced with escalating prices for pulp and rapidly changing energy costs. Similar to other manufacturers, we cannot absorb these increased costs indefinitely without making an adjustment. While one of our competitors recently increased their price by six percent, we chose to maintain our existing price but decreased the number of sheets in some cartons. This direction allows us to offer lower promotional prices.

Also, we recently adjusted the sheet to a size equal to other tissues currently on the market, standardizing the sheet size in the facial tissue category. —Kimberly-Clark Customer Service

Although most shoppers won’t miss the two-tenths of inch from each tissue, for the company, the savings are nothing to sneeze at.

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Toilet Paper Downsizes in a New Way

We all know that toilet paper has been downsized for decades.  Charmin has gone from 600 or 650 sheets on the roll all the way down to 200 or so over the years. Other brands followed suit.  Even Scott’s 1000 sheet roll was downsized in a sneaky way in 2006 by making each sheet shorter.

The case of Cottonelle’s downsizing is a bit unusual, however.  Look at these two packages of their toilet paper purchased at the same time last month:

Cottonelle 

*MOUSE PRINT:  Both packages give the exact same dimensions for the contents — they say there are 304 sheets on each roll, and that sheets are 4.2 inches by 4.0 inches.  Clearly the package on the left is taller by about 3/4 of an inch (with rolls stacked on top of one another core to core).

What is going on here? The company said:

Because of all the precautions taken in our manufacturing plants, it is difficult to explain how the product you received escaped our detection.  Please accept our apology and our assurance that we will do our best to prevent a recurrence.  The proper roll height is 4.2 inches.  During 2007, we reduced the size of our COTTONELLE® bathroom tissue slightly to align our roll height [number of sheets per roll] with other premium tissue products on the market.  At that time, the sheet width was reduced from 4.5″ down to 4.2″.  The length of each sheet (4.0″ between the perforations) did not change.

So it looks like some of the older 4.5″ width rolls were put into a newer wrapper that had the new lowered sheet count and narrower width on the label.  One can only wonder if this was truly a “mistake” or rather an interim step in the downsizing process to hide the change for anyone comparing the older label to the newer one.

This then appears to be the industry’s latest ploy — downsizing toilet paper by making each sheeter narrower. Toilet paper has historically been 4.5 inches wide as demonstrated by Quilted Northern:

  Northern

If you peruse the supermarket aisle you will notice that very few brands are 4.5 inches wide anymore. (Scott 1000 sheet role still is, for the moment.) Others are 4.3 inches, 4.27 inches, 4.2 inches, or even 4.0 inches.

Angel Soft Charmin Northern

If this trend continues, soon they will be marketing products to us that look more like dental floss than toilet paper.

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Skimpy Peanut Butter — Part 2

The “regular” size jar of peanut butter has been 18 ounces for decades. But if you haven’t checked the label of Skippy recently, you are in for a surprise. 

*MOUSE PRINT:  Unilever removed 3 tablespoons-worth from every jar — that’s 1.7 ounces.

Skippy

How did they do it given that the jars appear to be virtually the same height and circumference?  They hollowed out the bottom more, making an even deeper impression in the plastic — close to half an inch.

Skippy ruler

Mouse Print* asked the company why they downsized the product and did nothing to call the consumer’s attention to that fact. They responded:

Unilever has always taken great pride in offering the highest quality products at reasonable and fair prices. Food inflation is only one element of a general rise in commodity costs – such as oil prices. It is an industry issue that is impacting all companies in the food, beverage and retail sector. Manufacturing and transportation costs also have increased significantly with the surge in fuel oil prices. Like other companies, Unilever is working to mitigate the impact of these rising commodity costs through hedging, product reformulation and cost savings programs. We have chosen to reduce package sizes as one of our responses to these dramatic input cost increases.

Note that they never answered the second part of the question.

Even if shoppers have not yet noticed Skippy’s  reduction in net weight, competitors have.  Look how large the makers of Jif are promoting the fact that their jar is still 18 ounces:

Jif