I’m sorry but I don’t understand your suggestion. That’s what the sign does. It warns clients when the package got smaller and or price went up. Also, all stores are obligated to show the price/kg on all products so it’s easy to compare.
You don’t need a special sign for shrinkflation. What’s needed is just price per kg (I live in the metric world) displayed as big as the price per unit. This should be enforced as the norm and not on whether the store wants to do it or not.
Consumers who aren’t interested enough to keep track of price increases since last week won’t care about a special sign either.
“If it’s not a 100% perfect all encompassing solution then it’s not worth doing” is such a braindead take of which I see people like you make everywhere
I love the friendly tone you have in a discussion.
It’s not the producers that’s going to pay for putting up and taking down the signs. It’s the stores and in the end the consumers.
Add to this the cost of having someone going around checking that the rules are followed.
Keeping track of whether there is a compare price or not on all items is much easier and cheaper.
So yeah, it’s a populist solution putting up signs for price increase only for goods that has shrunk and it seems extremely easy to circumvent if you want to.
Here’s how you circumvent it: Introduce a 750g, 900g and 1000g package of the product. 900g is more expensive per gram than the 1000g. Then you have a “shortage” on the 1000g package and some stores run out of it. There’s no shrinkflation here since the 900g package has been there all the time.
There’s a lot of money to make here so hiring a lawyer that finds every single loophole will be a good investment.
But yeah, you call the take braindead and watch the politicians, lawyers and producers laugh over a change that cost you, not them, money.
I do that because I used to work in grocery stores and can noticed even small, incremental price changes on many items. Most consumers don’t do that and hardly notice 3 cents more on this and 2 ounces short on that. We are already accustomed to toilet paper and laundry detergent mega-size and “concentrated” bullshit.
Price per kilogram is good if you want to compare product A vs product B (we already have that). Here the point of this law is to be able to compare product A with itself in another point in time, because there is nothing actually in place to be able to reliably do that other than keeping a list of all prices at all time. The two together will be a very good tool to inform the consumers about the shady practice of some producers…
The whole point with shrinkflation is to trick the consumer to think that they’re buying the same amount when they don’t.
If you make it easy for the consumer to see what the cost is per kilogram, they will immediately see that the price for the same size package of cereal they always buy has gone up.
It’s okay if you want to pay extra for your groceries, but I don’t. I’m perfectly fine with compare prices since the compare prices are unaffected by the change of package sizes.
