People are just not price sensitive to most things. It’s also seen as bad to be thrifty, most people think of you as being cheap or stingy. Everything is about appearances now, people are more worried about what other people think than their own interests.
Companies have also figured out that they can make more profit by raising prices and shipping less product. They have to pay less in overhead and wages and get the same amount of money.
The biggest shrinkflation culprit is food. People need food. Recent trends do, in fact, show that American consumers have been switching to cheaper brands and reducing consumption of some items, but boycotting is unrealistic. People need to eat and a handful of massive corporations own most brands.
What, haven’t you all spent three months to grow one head of lettuce? Just skip breakfast for breakfast and eat cereal for dinner!
I have shrinkflation more than inflation. I have receipes that are all screwed up
Addiction. People are psychologically addicted to fast foods. This is like asking poor people why they don’t quit smoking to save money.
Speaking as someone who worked fourteen hour days in the video game industry for fucking peanuts… explain when I was supposed to cook dinner. And I live in a high CoL area - don’t assume I had a stay at home partner or private chef or any of that bullshit. Most weekends I’d sleep straight through to catch up on sleep I had lost during the week.
Fast food isn’t cheap, so you weren’t doing any favors to yourself if you were actually making peanuts (tip: if you were eating Fast food regularly, you were better off financially than you thought). It takes like 120 seconds out of the day to prepare enough rice to last a person a whole day. Throw on some washed veggies to steam at the same time. There are definitely better options out there.
Just to clarify, have you ever worked a 58 hour week with an additional ten hours commuting? I think you’re underestimating the mental fatigue involved with that much work and how difficult it can be to find energy to buy groceries and keep a kitchen stocked after that.
This isn’t the pity Olympics. I can tell you that I was self-employed while a full-time student, making random 200+ mile trips for work all hours of the day, “working” probably 80+ hours a week and sleeping every chance I got, but I don’t think you’d believe or care. A 20lb bag of rice is like $15 at most. If you’re actually poor and actually have no time, then you can’t afford to do anything but prepare your own food.
I’m glad you had the fortitude after working 80 hours to drive hundreds of miles and cook yourself a meal - personally, I didn’t and I don’t think most people would have.
if you were eating Fast food regularly, you were better off financially than you thought
Wow, so being able to afford a McDouble or a McChicken on the regular means I’m well off? Despite the fact that it is absolutely more expensive to buy ingredients for dinner??
If we’re saying you’re buying $20+ meals every time you eat, then yeah, you are better off - but most of the time, people eat fast food because it is absolutely cheaper and easier to do than it is to buy ingredients to make meals with. If all you have is $5 to your name because you can barely afford rent and expenses, are you gonna go buy a head of lettuce and a potato for the whole $5, or are you gonna go to McDonalds and be able to eat 5 meals for $1 per meal?
What five meals are you getting from McDonald’s at one dollar each?
Never said well off, but not as poor as you think. I think McDonald’s prices vary regionally but even in my LCoL area, you can’t buy a “meal” for less than $8.
If all you have is $5 to your name because you can barely afford rent and expenses, are you gonna go buy a head of lettuce and a potato for the whole $5
If you’re smart, yes.
or are you gonna go to McDonalds and be able to eat 5 meals for $1 per meal?
This hasn’t been the case for years. The only items for $1 that McDonald’s sells now are sodas.. You can’t even get one proper meal from McD’s for that whole $5.
I live in a VHCOL area, and I can tell you both the McChicken and the McDouble are around $3 where I live. Also, please tell me what kind of satisfying meal you can make with a lettuce and a potato that you can stretch for more than 5 meals, because I’d very much like to hear your idea of a meal based on those two ingredients alone. Hell, tell me any satisfying meal you can make for $5 that can stretch for 5 meals - and don’t just go “bUy ThE fIvE dOlLaR cHiCkEn”, because that requires a membership for either Sam’s Club or Costco, both of which are expensive to afford when you’re earning peanuts.
McDonald’s does sell sodas for $1, but there are actual food items that are on their $3/$2/$1 menu.
Potato and lettuce were your idea, not mine. I said rice, which is perfectly satisfying fried or steamed and with maybe some steamed veggies to people who aren’t, you know, addicted to greasy, colorful, highly-caloric, processed “foods.” None of what you just linked is a meal to well-adjusted people.
Also if you’ve spent hours slaving away in front of a stove working fast food, the idea of spending a few hours more slaving in front of your own stove to make dinner isn’t particularly tempting.
It’s so effective, but you just can’t expect to get everyone on board sadly. Unfortunately it seems that there will always be those that value the convenience of Amazon, for example, over pushing for real change. Look at Bud Light, I hated the reasoning behind the boycott but it showed just how powerful collective action can be against corporations.
How exactly did it show that? From what I saw, a bunch of people went out and bought Bud Light so they could film themselves on TikTok destroying the cans, Bud Light got a bunch of free publicity, and then everyone forgot about it. That’s not exactly meaningful change.
I would think that there were very few people doing that overall. I’ll have to find the articles again but they suffered a massive drop in sales, it’s possible though that those sales figures have since recovered but I don’t have that info on hand.
Ah okay. I didn’t know their sales numbers actually declined.
if there is anything that I have learned in the past 8 years, it is that the American tolerance for capitalist fuckery has a much higher threshold than I would have predicted, provided that there is someone worse off who we can look down on
What’s the alternative? Price control by state?
Get corporate money out of politics, bust up monopolies/oligopolies, implement better regulations that hold executives/board members personally liable
Seize the means of production!
More seriously though, follow the money.
If the profits of the company were predominantly distributed to the workers-as-owners then they probably won’t be mandating 5% year-on-year profit growth or chasing an ever growing share price.
They could, but it’d be themselves they’ll be exploiting.
Where there is an “out of sight out of mind” separation between the owners (shareholders, board, CxO’s) and workers then exploitation is invisible and the money is the only important aspect.
Sure, subsidize producers and give people a UBI. Problem solved.
I learned what cowards Americand are when it was admitted that the Iraq War was started on lies and everyone just shrugged and went about their day.
it’s still possible there were weapons of mass destruction. I mean just about as likely as it seemed back then. very very slim.
Why are they cowards? Why would they care if it doesn’t affect their daily lives? Obviously some people care, but the majority would indeed just shrug and go back to making ends meet.
This comes down to the good old “keep the masses fed”. People are being given just the right amount of wealth. Not enough to be free and not too little to revolt.
I tried boycotting food but then I got hungry.
I started foraging and buying from farmers markets…
You must smell amazing
Your comment is unbelievably ignorant and assuming.
In reality foraging is a great way to supplement your diet of farmers market produce on top of having an edible garden.
There is also the fact that my farmers market also includes a local soap maker…
If your local farmers market doesn’t have a soap maker go try your local craft market instead of posting redundant comments like this.
What does soap have to do with the sweet smell of berries and fruit?
I assumed earthy forests and mushrooms and was now want to forage :)
Oh, my apologies I was on the defensive and took your comment sarcastically.
(US Perspective) It’s hard to boycott food when like 10 companies own everything. Even store brands are just re-packaged “name” brands.
Edit: Obligatory: Fuck Nestle. I’m already boycotting the whole left side of that chart.
Edit 2: Ugh. One hour old account. I fully expect this account to be self-deleted soon and any conversations here to be lost forever.
That’s not even just a US perspective. That definitely applies to North America in general and Europe. There are supposedly anti-monopoly laws but huh, would you look at that… it’s almost like they’re ineffective.
While the corporations own the government, the government will never effectively police the corporations.
Not trying to gotcha you or nothing, but it’s funny, that image being hosted on amazon aws.
Haha. I was going to upload it to my own instance, but AWS-hosted media typically don’t block hotlinking. Saves me some bandwidth egress costs and storage xD
Fuck Nestle indeed. I’ve been boycotting their shit since they started hawking water bottled in communities without reliable access to clean water.
Donxc forget the other issues on supermarket chain. Which are also an oligopoly.
One of the reason why european farmer are getting angry is that they are pushed to sell at low prices by supermarket purchasing departments and see the price of their products multiplied by 10 when sold to the consumer.
Not consuming highly processed food from Nestle is doable. Not buying anything at the supermarket gets complicated unless you have money and time (and I wouldn’t be surprised that many neighbourhood and organic shop still buy food through the large supermarket purchasing chain)
Nestle owns a whole lot more than what’s shown on that chart.
all of them do
My local farmers market is really nice.
Yeah, these are all prepared foods in the picture. Maybe people don’t know but you can just like… make your own food.
Lots of things are just flour with other ingredients baked in an oven. Soda is just sugar and fizzy water. If you’ve never had homemade potato chips, you haven’t lived.
This weekend, find a recipe for a basic ingredient that you like (ketchup, mayo, bread, etc.) and buy the ingredients for it. Then make it. You’ll be surprised how easy and tasty it is. Mayo is like eggs and oil. Why pay $5 for a crappy version of it?
It doesn’t matter, because boycotts are generally futile since they at best only address skin level symptoms (at worst, and almost always - you’re just giving your money to a different scummy capitalist), they can’t cure the cancer, which is precisely why they’re touted as a wonderful solution (by capitalists trying to ensure the public don’t take any meaningful action against them).
That article needs to be its own post
I partly agree but I do think you have cause and effect (or disease and symptom if you will) swapped around. You‘re saying people don‘t do boycotts because they are futile. I would say it‘s the other way around and to answer OPs question, I think it largely comes down to commodity and mindlessness. But either way I think you are definitely right to suggest there must be systemic change and that all of this co2 compensation bullshit is just corporations guilt-tripping us into thinking we can consume our way out of this mess. However, the problem is that both approaches, the personal boycotts and the systemic change share a common factor, which is the requirement of mass action. If people aren‘t mindful enough to stop buying a particular kind of yoghurt, how are you ever going to get them to vote, much less stage a revolution? I think we need to get out of our passivity and boycotting things is a step in the right direction to establish a feel for personal agency.
If people aren‘t mindful enough to stop buying a particular kind of yoghurt, how are you ever going to get them to vote, much less stage a revolution? I think we need to get out of our passivity
How about people who aren’t mindful enough of those who can’t stop buying one brand or another, but especially of the reasons why??? (like - they only have one local store that only carries the one brand, or they carry two brand made by the same parent company, or they have three brands, two by the same company and the third by another one with just-as-bad practices. Or they’re too poor to buy the more “ethical” brand, or they simply don’t have the time in their day to even be aware of a boycott over exploitative practices, because they themselves are being exploited at 3 different jobs just to survive) I guarantee that kind of mindfulness hurts the working class significantly more than the kind you’re angry about.
If you want people to stop being “passive” - you destroy the system designed to keep them that way (not actually passive at all, they’re probably more active than you’ll ever be, just deliberately kept undereducated and too busy trying to survive), insisting on them continuing to play by the rules said system has made available to them (precisely because they have no real impact) only serves those in power to maintain the status quo.
George Monbiot is a fantastic writer.
In my view, the issue is that most people are not willing to change their own patterns in the slightest.
It’s always somebody else’s responsibility to give things exactly how they want. Personal responsibility and decisions have no play.
“Fuck Nestle. Oh yeah but I needed water, what was I supposed to do, die? I had no choice but to purchase water in plastic, there was no other store around and I don’t know how to plan for my needs in advance. There is simply no way to anticipate that I could have needed water and fill a reusable bottle before I leave the house.”
“The price of fast food is insane. It does not occur to me that I don’t need to purchase this, and I have no inherent right to get it at a cheap price. It has also never occurred to me to go to the grocery store. Oh wait, yes it actually did occur to me, but I really don’t want to cook, I want somebody else to make the food for me and for it to be cheap.”
Personally, I’m done with Sony, I’m done with Nestle, I’m done with Walmart, I’m done with fast food, I’m done with Netflix. I’m done with all the places that behave unethically, and it would not be fair of me to complain about them while also patronizing them. I don’t think you’ll find this attitude in general population.
It’s also because “the free market will fix it” is neoliberal bullshit that is pushed precisely because it doesn’t work. It’s just a way of blaming consumers for the horrifically immoral actions of corporations and they’ve suckered you right in.
Regulations could immediately stop Nestle using child slaves, no boycotts required.
I hate Walmart too and we definitely gave up fast food. But my only other choice for groceries is Reasors and they are fucking us on prices. So where do I shop for my groceries?
This guy wouldn’t know the meaning of the phrase “food desert” if it hit him at 60 mph while he was in a crosswalk.
I agree saw his reply to another comment who raised a similar point and he thinks we are just not looking hard enough. Dude clueless. Must be nice to live somewhere that has 1000 choices.
When ‘let them eat kellogs’ becomes more of a reality
You see, were old poor. Were used to it. You need new poor to really get things going
What I think could actually help would be to put into law that the per-weight price needs to be displayed just as prominently as the actual total price.
The problem right now is that largely people don’t notice if the packaging is the same size but the weight is slightly lower and the price is the same. If the per-weight price was shown as prominently as the actual price, people might suddenly notice the price hike more easily.
Or at least require actual prices instead of crap like “3 for $8.00 with card”. You have to read through several different fine-print prices at the very bottom of the label to find what the actual price is.
A lot of stores put that on their labels, but they engage in fuckery making you do the math yourself to compare. An example is that they’ll show how much something is per ounce for one brand, and then show how much it is per can/pound/bag/whatever for another brand.
Hmmm I don’t see that kind of stuff in Denmark, possibly we already have laws preventing that sort of crap.
I’m already jealous. Do the label prices also include taxes? Cause ours sure don’t. lol
In Québec, (some) of the grocery price tags include a fine print with the $/100g.
They go out of their way to make this the smallest thing possible though.
There’s plenty of other misleading tagging going on too.
And I think it’s only certain items, maybe not all.
It’s a good idea and helpful, but should be more prominent and apply to literally all foods.And that’s before tax, although not all foods are taxed.
Of course, it’s always the same tax anyway and it must be included by law. The per weight price is also always stated but it’s always in tiny text - my suggestion is simply to require it to be displayed just as prominently :)
Between you and Sandi Toksvig making it sound amazing, I’m seriously considering retiring to Denmark lol
It’s the best country in the world if you ask me :)
But getting temporary and then later permanent residence, let alone citizenship is not easy, especially if you are not in the EU. Not that it’s impossible.
Safeway is the worst about it. They mark everything up by a preposterous amount, and then sell it at the regular price, but only if you’re a “club member” and only if you buy 4 of whatever you needed one of. Then they sell your data after you make the purchase. Oh, and those were perishable goods, so you either massively overpaid for one item and wasted money, or you bought four, half of it spoiled before you could use it, and you wasted money.
Sounds pretty shit. We have “nemlig” for home delivery of groceries. Used it a few times, seemed reasonable.
We have that where I live and it honestly makes buying per weight / per sheet, incredibly helpful.
There’s been so many times, just looking at the packaging, I thought it was a great deal to then see the per weight price and release what a rip off it was.
Massive quality of life for sure!
We have it too in Denmark but not as prominently as the actual price.
We have per weight pricing on a lot of items in The Netherlands. It’s great for comparing different items when you’re in the supermarket, but doesn’t really work against shrinkification. You simply don’t remember the price-per-kg from last week.
We have it too in Denmark but it’s usually a tiny font compared to the actual price. Which is why I say just as prominently. I’ve actually started to write per weight prices down so I can compare better.
Because boycotting food means you starve.
It’s not possible to boycott a brand over an action if every other brand is doing the same fucking thing.
… some friends and I have been discussing a monthly meetup where we exchange around food or other things we do, like handiwork. I wonder what’s involved in baking up a bunch of corn flakes that aren’t made of garbage? Maybe it’d be fun to have people over and figure it out. Mix up the recipe a little each month, or pass it around between the group members.
I’m not trying to shame you like this is obvious, but I have also been thinking about “how can I escape this corporate hellscape???” and this is starting to be more the direction I’m heading.
It’s probably worth giving a try - I usually bake my own bagels and that’s an economically reasonable activity… I’d be worried that cereal would be unreasonable to do without a dehydrator or other specialized equipment but there’s a lot of cook-ready food you could make. Pickled veggies and peppers are amazing, perogies or dumplings are easy to make in a freeze friendly manner, spaghetti sauce is insanely good vut usually doesn’t freeze well - that’s a classic example of a dish where it takes equal amounts of effort to prepare for two people or two dozen.
Cereal might not be the best but there are alternatives if you can get a group together… especially if you can cut across food cultures!
People have tried that before - every attempt at a utopian society has failed. e.g. perhaps someone will bring “homemade milk”, and after the 99th time people begin to relax and whoopsie forget to check it, then a large portion of the group gets exposed to a serious illness, maybe many die, the problems with communal actions get revealed.
Or else that person decides to get REALLY serious with their milk, and people decide to help chip in each week to defray the costs… and voila, capitalism is rediscovered!:-D
Though for the therapeutic benefits alone, it’s probably mostly worthwhile - and anyway I’m cynical and bitter so please don’t let that stop you:-). Probably the fact that you can see people’s faces that would be affected by everyone’s actions may make the difference?
You’re right, that’s pretty cynical.
It’s a bit like going “zero waste” or something. 1 person being completely zero waste, or being completely self sufficient, isn’t helping anything.
But everyone reducing their waste or being a bit self sufficient world make a big difference.
There are risks with communal groups, bit we’re better placed to navigate them than ever before.
I dunno if every human reducing their waste would make a “big” difference anymore, at this point. I mean, I do it anyway b/c it’s how I want to face the world, but I no longer have any expectations that it will affect any positive change - like even if every human being on the planet were to switch from individual cars to bicycles, how many oil spills would entirely counteract that - just one major one, maybe two more normal ones, or three “small” ones?
So I am not saying don’t do the communal stuff - go nuts! It probably really would be fun, and again therapeutic. But from a “managing expectations” standpoint, it is a personal hobby, not likely to have a realistic impact.
The corporations returned to oligopolism years ago. The government knows, and they’re complicit.
