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How Skimpflation Works in Restaurants

In October last year, Red Robin announced an upgrade — that it had a “new and improved lineup of gourmet burgers” that were “juicier and more flavorful.”

This August, Red Robin further announced a limited time promotion for a gourmet cheeseburger and unlimited fries for $10. No doubt, this is a pretty good deal given fast food prices and portion sizes today.

Red Robin $10 promotion

One Red Robin regular, WiseSofa1748, commented on their burgers in the following post, saying they are not as good as they used to be because the reason they are juicier is that they are fattier.

The new burgers they use suck. The old ones they had for years and years were so good. I asked the store manager when I last went and she told me it was really to cut costs, they went to a less lean, cheaper cut of beef that allowed it to be “juicier” aka more fat and slightly bigger bc its a crappier cut. It doesn’t taste near as good. Same for the bun and cheese she said, both were swapped out and Red Robin claimed it was for taste but as always it was to save a buck.

Are the consumer and the manager right? We did a little detective work to compare the current nutritional disclosures for their gournet cheeseburger with the previous listing from a year earlier, excerpted below.

*MOUSE PRINT:
Red Robin Nutritional comparison

Indeed, the amount of fat content went up, while the amount of protein went down. Since the company announced that it was making its burgers bigger and juicier last year, that could account for the increase in fat. However, the amount of protein should have gone up too if the company maintained the same lean to fat ratio.

We made multiple requests of the company to find out if they made the alleged changes to their burgers, but they did not respond.

While the media focuses on shrinkflation a lot these days, skimpflation is even more insidious. With shrinkflation, at least you can objectively discover when a product shrinks. But with skimpflation, product tweaks or reformulations are not generally announced or easy to discern.

We don’t know the recipes used by restaurants, the exact portion size you normally get, the grades of meat they buy, the quality or quantity of all the ingredients used in a dish, etc. So it is even easier to tinker with these things and most consumers would be none the wiser.

If you spot an example of skimpflation, please send the details and any proof you can unearth to Edgar (at symbol) MousePrint.org. Thanks.

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Sometimes Zero-Percent Financing Is Not Zero Percent

Don’t you get annoyed when you see something advertised as one thing, but then learn there is also a sneaky catch that changes the offer?

That’s what happened recently to Mark D. He told us about a TV commercial he had seen from Sleep Number — the adjustable bed company — offering zero-percent financing on certain mattresses.

Sleep NUmber TV ad

The fine print that is very easy to miss has a surprise for purchasers who were expecting to pay no finance charges.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Sleep Number 2% fee

The company added a sneaky two-percent junk fee onto each monthly payment.

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Getting So Many Search Results Makes Shopping Harder

Have you ever noticed how bad some retailers’ online search results are? You are searching for a pretty specific thing, but the search results you get show you tons of irrelevant products. Other sites provide you with exactly what you were searching for, but display so many results that you could never review all of them.

For example, having just bought a blood pressure monitor from Amazon, MrConsumer decided to check Wayfair during their Way Day sale. So he entered “blood pressure monitor” in quotes in their search field.

Look at the results.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Wayfair search results

It spit back a 200-page list containing 9,868 results! How many were actually blood pressure monitors? It appears to be four! And when I double-checked to see if they had the brand I bought, Omron… I got 45,861 results only one of which appeared to be an Omron brand product!

More recently, Wayfair improved. Now searching for “blood pressure monitor” provides “only” 4,410 results, 10 of which were actually those devices.

By comparison, Target provided 59 results, all of which were blood pressure monitors.

Amazon and Walmart had a different problem. Amazon offered about 450 relevant results. And Walmart provided about 1,250 results, virtually all of which were blood pressure monitors. How can any human deal with whittling down so many choices?

The abundance of relevant search results at Walmart is even prevalent when searching for grocery items making shopping online far more difficult.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Walmart Search Results

This whole concept of having too many choices has a name – the paradox of choice.

It is hard to say which is worse — too many irrelevant search results or too many relevant ones. What do you thnk and what has been your search and shopping experience?

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