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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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

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Holy Mackerel, StarKist Downsizes Tuna

Something is fishy at StarKist. In a move that will likely ripple through the entire tuna industry, the company has just downsized their tuna cans.

*MOUSE PRINT:

A customer service representative for StarKist explained that tuna prices have reached an all-time high, and coupled with the increased cost of transportation and other ingredients, they had to make a change. Instead of increasing the price, she said, they decreased the can size.

Putting an environmental spin on the downsizing, the company said it will save two million gallons of water a year, while only taking out two teaspoons of tuna from each can.

Tuna has a long history of being downsized. Once upon a time, tuna came in 7 ounce cans (at least solid white did). Then, cans were downsized to 6.5 oz., then 6-1/8 oz., and finally to 6 oz. maybe a decade ago. All the while, what had originally consisted of solid pieces of chunk light tuna fish, became a mush of too little fish and too much ocean.

[Note to readers: Because we are seeing more and more of these sneaky, backdoor price increases, Mouse Print* will only bring you news like this when a major product category is downsized.]