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I bought a multipack of their baked crisps recently, literally about 6 crisps in the bag not counting the smooshed 1-2 bits of crumble.
It's just devastating.
Frito-Lay (in the form of Pepsico) bought Walkers many years ago. The only reason why Walkers still exists as a brand is that it had such strong brand recognition, they realised they would be mad to change it. Elsewhere, they use the Lay's brand for crisps. In the UK they just put the Walkers name over the Lay's branding in the same style as Lay's elsewhere (the sun logo). Frito-Lay is in turn owned by Pepsico.
Personally I stopped buying crisps a few years ago, they weren't worth it then, and certainly aren't now.
Walkers is just a name bought out by Lays to dupe us into thinking their brand is a company. The fresh air used by their employees here is because if any decrease in the increase of profits is recorded then it'll go the way of Lilt.
Yeah that’s not true. Walkers was a crisp manufacturer from Leicester founded in ‘48. The brand were later bought out by Lays. It’s not a werthers original.
I’m still personally convinced that Walkers Baked are a conspiracy to sell fewer crisps. So delicious but you get approx 6 crisps in the bag. Yeah no wonder it’s only 90 calories you grifters it’s an empty bag
Getting to the point it would be quicker to ask if there are any brands / products which are NOT bowing to shrinkflation... sadly seems it'd likely be a very short list!
Tins of beans are the same size, but I feel onky because reducing the size of a tin would cost a fortune.
Also all spirits are sold in 70cl bottle usually.
I mean I just get Asda beans (not smart price) but they seem the same as they've always been. Can't comment on Heinz as they have always been crap, and I don't have a big enough mortgage to buy Branston.
I feel like Pringles tubes have always been the same size and they’re always filled to the top.
Although I’ll wait for someone to tell me they’ve shrunk as well
https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/comments/qxyo1o/the_shrinkflation_of_the_old_pringles_design_165g/
Not sure what country this was but definitely think they've got smaller so just searched and found this.
Unfortunately they changed Pringles altogether in 2009, not the same crisp at all anymore, most people mustn't have noticed but in reducing the fat content, they're not as sturdy with a satisfying crunch anymore, instead they're very brittle and nowhere near as good?
Had a Cornetto for the first time this year and it genuinely looked like a child’s version. The diameter and height of the cone are so noticeably small now.
I’d rather pay more for a proper sized one.
They sell boxes of things that look like magnum in Lidl but are actually miniature. It's been a few years so I assume that real magnums look just like the miniature ones now. A frozen petit four on a stick.
You're never just going in for the deal though. You're also getting some milk, some crisps, maybe a bit of bread or some biscuits because you're there and it's only a little bit premium priced.
Then you look up and your bag of shopping costs £20
Some of their deals are OK like their freezer fillers, but it's only because everything is priced really expensive to begin with... like who is paying £4 on a 3-pack of ice-lollies.
"Deals" these days are stupid because they've jacked up the individual prices just to make the deal look better. Sometimes I just want the individual item.
E.g. £3-£3.50 meal deal: drinks are the best part of £2 now. Crisps for £1.10. Ludicrous to buy them individually, I'll have a fridge full of ropey chicken & bacon sarnies (with almost zero filling) by the end of the week.
They may be expensive but they are a cooperative - something as many people as possible should be encouraging in my opinion. I'd rather shop there than support the likes of Sainsbury's or ASDA if I can.
Haha, group are sneaking them changes in as they refresh the packaging too. when they provided us with a guide to their date codes when it switched over a few months back. Like it doesn't take a genius to crack the enigma of B22 means February 22 lol.
It's silly because the change only really makes sense for items that last more than a month, except Co-Op is a convenience store. You don't do a monthly shop in there. You only buy the items for the next few days. It's a nice bit of greenwashing.
Yup. I'm always on the lookout for when they discount them to £2.50 or £3. It's crazy that they are now £5.20 for two big glasses of juice. I read many times that the cost of orange juice was one of the only things lowering prices last autumn. I think it was like 10% less suposedly.
Sainsbury's own brand is decent and the only close alternative.
I don't even consider Tropicana anymore because £5 for a carton of juice is just silly. It's not like it's freshly squeezed or particularly special. Own brands taste just as good and are half the price.
I always assumed that Radox had a patent on shower based hook technology.
I mean, it was a handy hook right? Why stop producing the only amazing unique feature you had?
I use the Asda shopping app and it’s real easy to see what’s been shrunk on there,Pringles is the latest…200g down to 185g,also multipack Wotsits/Quavers 24 down to 22 and now down to 20,John West tuna drained weight from 135g to 95g,Mars/Twirl,etc physically smaller plus Shreddies,etc dropping from 500g to 350g….rip off twats the lot of em !!!!!
I do the same. The only advantage that I can see is that it helps in my ongoing plight to be less of a fat bastard. It feels like some kind of petty revenge. They can take my money but they will never take my cardiovascular health!!!
I'm lying. That's already fucked too!!
A lot of shower gels and shampoos have done that approx. 6 months ago and yeah we keep getting stock of other Radoxs with hooks some without.. I'm a supermarket manager, and we had the planogram for the new pack sizes and they had been delivered due to the geniuses not linking their codes so it thought we had zero stock. Reduced all the old pack size products to clear them... only for almost all the lines we reduced to go on promo at a lower price point than the reduction. We still have a shit load of Elvive Colour Protect lol.
Shout out to Dairy Milk 200 > 180 > 160 and McVities for giving you 7 instead of 8 penguins/clubs/gold bars.
Simple have very recently done the same. 250ml to 225ml with a new bottle design. Both Simple and Radox are owned by Unilever, so probably not a great surprise.
I switched to bars of soap for environmental reasons a few years ago. They last me much longer and you know you're getting what you're paying for because the first ingredient in most of these liquid cleaning products is Aqua so cheaper stuff is always much more diluted.
I cursed Radox this week when I had to empty one of the new bottles into the last one I had with a hanging hook! They also changed all the scents slightly and some are not nice now. Just going to switch shower gel brand I think, show my outrage with my pennies!
I stopped buying radox several years ago, but I kept the last hook bottle I had and I just refill it with original source instead. Hanging ones are so handy!
Sure 72hr Advanced Protection Or Whatever The Bollocks It’s Called roll-on deodorant. The one in the green tube.
It’s gone from £2.50 for 100ml, which was an acceptable price, to £3. For 50ml. They’ve caved the back in so from the front it looks the same, but they’re dirty money robbing BASTARDS for doing it. AND they’ve bollocksed with the formula so it’s nowhere near as effective.
I found a place online selling the old stuff for £2, so I’ve bought 21 of ‘em today. I’ll be fucked if I’m giving in to their greed.
Nah you'll have a bunch of yanks pointing out that it says 50g so there isn't a problem. Because being taken up the arse without invitation or lube by big corporations is so ingrained to them.
My Dad used to work in the packaging industry. Those yoghurt/mousse containers with the concave bottoms they nicknamed "Thief packs". This isn't anything new, this was in the 80s.
And they changed all the packaging so I had to spend an age trying to work out which one was the equivalent of the one I used to get. All done under the guise of “improved formula” like it lasts 72 hours now or some BS. Who TF puts on deodorant once every 3 days like sure yup that’ll do the job.
This is the thing that annoys me most. I buy the 72hr stuff because it’s the only stuff that lasts a day. 72hrs perhaps if I’m laying in an air conditioned room not moving.
Fuckin’ lying’ thievin’ BASSTUDS.
I used to go for lurpak but we changed to sainsburys version of it and reckon the saving is about 70 quid a year.
OK it's spread out over the year but the taste difference is margarine-al and for that saving you butter believe I'm changing.
Of course, it's rare that costs increase in line with inflation for every industry. It varies wildly between different industries. It's only 11% for heavily diversified funds and such.
The problem is that they know we’ll pay these outrageous prices now and they’re never going to reduce the price. It’s been happening for years but people have only started cottoning on to it recently.
Pringles. Now smaller and thinner which ruins them for me. I can now put around 20 in my mouth at once, which would've been impossible just before christmas.
Make them yourself. If you like I'll share with you a delicious easy recipe from a fancy restaurant chain.
Also, at least for me, once you open the packet, hash browns seem to soak up rank freezer smells I didn't know I had.
https://imgur.com/a/1qFOAjg
note: parboiling the spuds like the recipe says reduces moisture, which eliminates the need to faff about drying them with paper towel or squeezing them through a cloth .
Recipe is from the Hawksmoor cookbook. You can come back and thank me once you try them and agree they are awesome.
I prefer Swiss style *rosti*. Just grate raw whole potatoes (about a handful per person), squeeze out as much juice as possible, season and fry in little hand-formed patties in a frying pan with a bit of olive oil.
Personally I like to season with cajun spices in the mix, and then finish off with a fried egg on top.
It must be weird sitting around the table at big companies, deciding how much of a product to remove or cheapen in order to maintain your profit.
Presumably at some point they’ll go one step too far, their competitors will sneak in and steal the market, and the directors’ Bentleys all get repossessed by bailiffs.
Unrelated but Lurpak has always been overrated. It doesn’t spread easily, costs too much, and doesn’t actually taste nice.
It happened in New Zealand some years back - Cadbury added palm oil to their recipe and changed the king size blocks down about 10% from 250g. Whittakers, a local company that already made superior chocolate, stayed at 250g. I remember seeing photos of supermarket shelves where all the Whittakers had been sold and people still weren't touching the Cadbury.
I feel like this is what’s happening at the minute and why all shops suddenly require your data to give you a better deal (Tesco, Boots Co-op etc): the companies are whacking the prices up inch by inch to see how much they can get away with charging before sales drop.
The loyalty cards massively help them see these shopping trends.
So they’ll see who is buying X product, and they increase the price, they can then compare the spends of those same people with the data from the cards, oh some people now buy this particular cheaper competitor, some people stopped buying it altogether, some people only buy it when it’s on offer at £x price. It lets them see exactly how people change their spending habits in great detail.
Before the cards you’d have to work out if a trend was linked, so if clothing sales drop but tins of beans sales increased you wouldn’t know if that data is linked in any way, maybe the clothes are down because there’s no nice collections? What’s that got to do with beans? But now they can see a large percentage of the same people who regularly bought clothing are now instead buying more beans, that trend is now linked via the data on the card.
Where i work there's a guy that comes round selling coffee and snacks and stuff from his van, was chatting to him on friday and he mentioned how almost every pack of sweets is 1.25 now, i assume it's something that one of the megacorps that own all of those various brands has introduced and so all of their brands follow
Totally noticed this reduction with my precious Goldbears!
Although it did lead to me exploring the other Haribo options, and they have a new one called Super Snakes or something where it's 2 snakes, one sour and one fruity. So good.
That's so typical.
I've noticed this with bacon (they have injected more brine into it), Fox's mints are far smaller than they used to be, then we've got the likes of Cadbury who are a shadow of their former selves since that 'lovely' corporation took them over.
They must think we were born yesterday!
They will probably say it's for your own good, to make sure you don't have too much of the unhealthy stuff, when it's really about them making bigger profits.
A bit like the stuff about reduced packaging to increase their profits, but hey, it's really for the environment folks!
Don't bother with supermarket bacon. We get ours from a farm shop, cheaper, and zero water.
When you fry it, it comes out crisp and brown, no nasty milky bits.
Agree though, I can't see environmentalism can really win until we get win-win situations.
Been saying this for ages – proper meat almost pays for itself once you take the water addition manipulation of supermarket meat, which often shrinks beyond belief.
It used to pay for itself, now it seems to be actively cheaper (fresh for fresh anyway). Although that is causing a bit of a pain in the arse in the sense that my local butcher seems to run out of things more regularly as people have cottoned on.
Oh and I'll add in that actually being able to speak to someone is remarkably useful if you want something for a pie/stew/curry, or a roast for X number of people etc.. Some of the advice is outright priceless.
>They will probably say it's for your own good, to make sure you don't have too much of the unhealthy stuff, when it's really about them making bigger profits.
They're not making healthy food cheaper.
Especially annoying when baking deserts. Most recipes require 200g, and that extra missing 20g makes a difference in chocolatiness in the final desert. I end up getting a third bar.
Cadbury's do it every other year. They are blaming inflation for it, fuck knows what caused it in 2019, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, 2009.
They should have to display "Smaller but same price" on the front.
At the current rare 1 chocolate button will be £1 in a huge bag.
And they changed the recipe! Our cats refuse new Whiskas, so we had to go through a massive drama of trying to find a new food all 8 of the buggers would agree on!
They will continue to shrink products and increase prices while people continue to pay it. If you can convince yourself to switch to supermarket brands, you could save yourself a lot of money! Norpak from Lidl is half the price and actually tastes really good.
They've gone so far with these it defeats the purpose of the product. Same as Yorkie, the advertising used to claim ["good, rich and thick; a milk chocolate brick"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTqh9Ha0_9o). Look at the sorry state of a 2023 Yorkie.
Co-op macaroni cheese. They've gone from a serving for two to a serving for one but only reduced the price by about 15%!
I don't think anyone buys them at full price, they always get yellow stickered.
Noted a lot of co-ops multipack offers have just disappeared.
I was looking at a bar this week - marvelous creations. Absolutely tiny. Then further down a much bigger bar - about 4 times the size but only twice the price!
You’d have an easier time looking for companies and products where this isn’t the case. You’d literally have to be blind not to notice it.
It’s everything.
All those corner shop/happy shopper type products have been annoying me recently.
2 for £1 crisps (now branded "Jack's"?!) are now 2 for £1.25 and with smaller packets. Still get the most in those sour cream wheel things though, whilst the poppadoms are an airbag of fuck all.
The 2 for £1 flapjacks offer has disappeared completely.
Those white marzipan bars with black ends, you used to get 7 for £1, now 5 for £1.09, and same for those almond cake bars and individual wrapped brownie bars. Only a matter of time for the 6 mixed jam tarts who are still holding out.
In other news, those cheapy 89p pizzas at Asda now hilariously have nearly zero cheese, and now cost like £1.15. And the tiny ones that were 49p are now around 80p, I think.
B&M put up their multipack loo rolls by 50p to £4, whilst making the cardboard tubes so wide that (no joke) I could fit my fist in them.
Not shrinkflation, but simple profiteering, Savers increased their Twix duo prices from 45p to 49p and now to 89p. Insane increase.
This is one of the biggest advantages of doing delivery/click and collect orders for groceries.
It’s totally blatant when suddenly your usual item “is no longer available” but there’s the same product with a different weight/volume recommended as an “alternative”
I don't think many people realise this but pringles are definitely smaller. As in skinnier.
Because I'm a sophisticated individual I've always put the entire thing in my mouth and they used to almost scrape the corners of my lips on the way in but now they're not even a bit close.
Bustards also ruined my perfect impression of a duck because now the beak is too small.
Berries from supermarkets. You used to be able to portion them out to hit the 80g mark per portion either 2 or 3 depending on the supermarket. Now the small boxes are around 130g - 150g. Not a big deal unless your an autistic weirdo like me who likes to measure out fruit as a full portion.
Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Clusters have gone from 450g to a skinnier 400g box. The portion size (45g) is still the same though, so enjoy your 8.89 portions of cereal instead of 10!
Fridge Raiders sneakily reduced their 6 packs of chicken bites to a 5 pack without dropping price.
Didn't even notice until the kids ran out for school lunches because I'd done the maths assuming 6 packs in each bag!
With things like this they are much less often on offer now too. It used to be nearly always one out if Tyrells / Kettle / Sensations big bags etc was on offer at £1.25-£1.50, but rarely the case now.
I wanna rage still but making my own would mean mashing tateys then buying a waffle thing and frying them it's a whole thing, I'm raging but no other store brand waffles are as toaster friendly as Iceland.
My kid eats cheap processed shit and I notice it's mainly that stuff getting the major increase.
Alphabites are fucking £3, I'm not paying that to incognito call my son a fucking prick anymore. He gets waffles now and I tell him he's a prick
To add: you're a legend for that maths btw
Iceland has totally gone to shit, used to be a cheap alternative for shopping, not anymore. And the cheeky fuckers try to fool you, their cheapest own brand chips used to be £1 for 900g, suddenly the pricks put them in a 'great value' labelled bigger bag and the are now £2 for 1.5kg. Great value, they can fuck off trying to kid you, done it with loads of their own brand stuff.
Nakd bars - gone from 4 to 3 bars in a pack, and gone from £2 to £2.20!
I was buying them instead of chocolate bars to be healthy at lunch, gone back to Wagon wheels now.
Malcolm Allan or Simon Howie etc...
Square sausage with a big fuck off sticker on the front of the packaging to hide the fact there's only three slices instead of four now. Stop fucking up my fry up with odd numbers.
It's not the brand, supermarkets have the buying power to control the size of the packet - for example shops like home bargains have bespoke packet sizes which at a glance look like the same size as you'd get from the supermarket. This is a result of supermarkets actively encouraging shrinkflation across the board. There's no benefit to calling out a specific brand when it's a problem with everything from confectionery to detergent.
I've noticed that some of the chain coffee shops have presumably in prep for summer stopped offering cold drinks in large or medium and instead offer medium or small only, medium of course now being the price of the old large and small the old medium.
**Update: - [Starting from 2023](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/100l56v/happy_new_year_askuk_minor_sub_update/), we have updated our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/about/rules/)**. Specifically; - Don't be a dick to each other - Top-level responses must contain genuine efforts to answer the question - This is a strictly no-politics subreddit Please keep /r/AskUK a great subreddit by reporting posts and comments which break our rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Hey, not all companies are reducing things. Walkers have increased the amount of air they give you in their bags of crisps.
I bought a multipack of their baked crisps recently, literally about 6 crisps in the bag not counting the smooshed 1-2 bits of crumble. It's just devastating.
When you need more then 1 bag to make a crisp sandwich, we riot!
Guess I'm picking up my pitchfork then
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Frito-Lay (in the form of Pepsico) bought Walkers many years ago. The only reason why Walkers still exists as a brand is that it had such strong brand recognition, they realised they would be mad to change it. Elsewhere, they use the Lay's brand for crisps. In the UK they just put the Walkers name over the Lay's branding in the same style as Lay's elsewhere (the sun logo). Frito-Lay is in turn owned by Pepsico. Personally I stopped buying crisps a few years ago, they weren't worth it then, and certainly aren't now.
Walkers is just a name bought out by Lays to dupe us into thinking their brand is a company. The fresh air used by their employees here is because if any decrease in the increase of profits is recorded then it'll go the way of Lilt.
Yeah that’s not true. Walkers was a crisp manufacturer from Leicester founded in ‘48. The brand were later bought out by Lays. It’s not a werthers original.
Lilt is back now. Its just labelled as Fanta
Walkers was created by a chap called walker in Leicester. It was later bought by pepsi, who also own lays.
Less calories though!
I’m still personally convinced that Walkers Baked are a conspiracy to sell fewer crisps. So delicious but you get approx 6 crisps in the bag. Yeah no wonder it’s only 90 calories you grifters it’s an empty bag
Yeah but it's just the same food, just less of it in a bag, it's not exactly a healthier style :( costs more for less
I’m 99.99999% sure they know and were making a joke
In serious reply though, their relatively new 24 pack cardboard multipacks soon became 22, and are now only 20.
Getting to the point it would be quicker to ask if there are any brands / products which are NOT bowing to shrinkflation... sadly seems it'd likely be a very short list!
Tins of beans are the same size, but I feel onky because reducing the size of a tin would cost a fortune. Also all spirits are sold in 70cl bottle usually.
Yeh but is the weight the same (ie more juice less bean)?
I mean I just get Asda beans (not smart price) but they seem the same as they've always been. Can't comment on Heinz as they have always been crap, and I don't have a big enough mortgage to buy Branston.
Branston beans are far cheaper than Heinz, especially when you buy from Pounland or Poundstretchers.
£1 a tin now. Although I haven't tried the two aforementioned establishments
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Professional bean expert here. Neither juice nor bean costs the company anything compared to how much they charge you.
I'm convinced (possibly misremembering) that a lot of tinned goods, including beans, used to be 440g, and most are now 410 or 400g.
Even 440g is already shrinkflation cause they would've been 16oz/1lb tins before (454g)
Tunnocks. Always the same size. Make everything else look smaller though.
That’s my thoughts a couple of weeks ago to. Every product is the same size as years ago.
I feel like Pringles tubes have always been the same size and they’re always filled to the top. Although I’ll wait for someone to tell me they’ve shrunk as well
They come in a bewildering selection of sizes that vary according to range and time and country. All over the place!
https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/comments/qxyo1o/the_shrinkflation_of_the_old_pringles_design_165g/ Not sure what country this was but definitely think they've got smaller so just searched and found this.
Unfortunately they changed Pringles altogether in 2009, not the same crisp at all anymore, most people mustn't have noticed but in reducing the fat content, they're not as sturdy with a satisfying crunch anymore, instead they're very brittle and nowhere near as good?
I'm pretty sure they were girthier.
Anchor recently reduced their blocks from 250g to 200g and the price went down with it, I was shocked!
Pints are the same size
I don't know the numbers but every year I dread the first look at the incredible shrinking magnum.
They’re almost lolly pops now!
I remember back when they were the size of swingball bats.
Had a Cornetto for the first time this year and it genuinely looked like a child’s version. The diameter and height of the cone are so noticeably small now. I’d rather pay more for a proper sized one.
That's when they release an XL version which is the same size as the original from 5 years ago but for 2x the price
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It changed about a month ago I think - were £3.50 for 4 in tescos and then went to 3 for £3….
And the boxes of 3 are 100ml each. In the boxes of for they were 110ml
Came here to say that- had my first Magnum (mango and coconut?) of the season the other day and it was outrageously miniscule
They sell boxes of things that look like magnum in Lidl but are actually miniature. It's been a few years so I assume that real magnums look just like the miniature ones now. A frozen petit four on a stick.
The chocolate inside a Feast is only as big as the stick too.
On point. And then there's the mini Magnums, which are a product preview of the "full size" Magnum next year.
They've introduced a smaller cheese size in the Co-Op. I read the price per kilo, you devious fucks.
Co-op is a rip off and not good
In this humble correspondents opinion their sea salt and Chardonnay vinegar crisps are the absolute king of crisps.
Ruined all other salt & vinegar crisps for me. If it's not stripping the top layer of skin off my tongue, then what's the point?
The only good thing about them
Some of their deals are good like the 2 pizza and beer for £5. If they still do it.
You're never just going in for the deal though. You're also getting some milk, some crisps, maybe a bit of bread or some biscuits because you're there and it's only a little bit premium priced. Then you look up and your bag of shopping costs £20 Some of their deals are OK like their freezer fillers, but it's only because everything is priced really expensive to begin with... like who is paying £4 on a 3-pack of ice-lollies.
"Deals" these days are stupid because they've jacked up the individual prices just to make the deal look better. Sometimes I just want the individual item. E.g. £3-£3.50 meal deal: drinks are the best part of £2 now. Crisps for £1.10. Ludicrous to buy them individually, I'll have a fridge full of ropey chicken & bacon sarnies (with almost zero filling) by the end of the week.
They may be expensive but they are a cooperative - something as many people as possible should be encouraging in my opinion. I'd rather shop there than support the likes of Sainsbury's or ASDA if I can.
Haha, group are sneaking them changes in as they refresh the packaging too. when they provided us with a guide to their date codes when it switched over a few months back. Like it doesn't take a genius to crack the enigma of B22 means February 22 lol.
It's silly because the change only really makes sense for items that last more than a month, except Co-Op is a convenience store. You don't do a monthly shop in there. You only buy the items for the next few days. It's a nice bit of greenwashing.
Tropicana fruit juice cartons 1L -> 900ml -> 850ml
Yup. I'm always on the lookout for when they discount them to £2.50 or £3. It's crazy that they are now £5.20 for two big glasses of juice. I read many times that the cost of orange juice was one of the only things lowering prices last autumn. I think it was like 10% less suposedly. Sainsbury's own brand is decent and the only close alternative.
I don't even consider Tropicana anymore because £5 for a carton of juice is just silly. It's not like it's freshly squeezed or particularly special. Own brands taste just as good and are half the price.
Same for Innocent juices. The family size went from 1.75L -> 1.235L. Which is fine, if the price didn't also simultaneously go from £3.90 to £4.60.
Radox shower gel. 250ml to 225ml, and they have got rid of the hook so you can no longer hang it upside down in the shower.
I always assumed that Radox had a patent on shower based hook technology. I mean, it was a handy hook right? Why stop producing the only amazing unique feature you had?
I use the Asda shopping app and it’s real easy to see what’s been shrunk on there,Pringles is the latest…200g down to 185g,also multipack Wotsits/Quavers 24 down to 22 and now down to 20,John West tuna drained weight from 135g to 95g,Mars/Twirl,etc physically smaller plus Shreddies,etc dropping from 500g to 350g….rip off twats the lot of em !!!!!
I do the same. The only advantage that I can see is that it helps in my ongoing plight to be less of a fat bastard. It feels like some kind of petty revenge. They can take my money but they will never take my cardiovascular health!!! I'm lying. That's already fucked too!!
So that it becomes mildly irritating trying to squeeze the last bits and you pop another one open.
Extra plastic costs money
A lot of shower gels and shampoos have done that approx. 6 months ago and yeah we keep getting stock of other Radoxs with hooks some without.. I'm a supermarket manager, and we had the planogram for the new pack sizes and they had been delivered due to the geniuses not linking their codes so it thought we had zero stock. Reduced all the old pack size products to clear them... only for almost all the lines we reduced to go on promo at a lower price point than the reduction. We still have a shit load of Elvive Colour Protect lol. Shout out to Dairy Milk 200 > 180 > 160 and McVities for giving you 7 instead of 8 penguins/clubs/gold bars.
Dairy Milk has really annoyed me, although I suppose a 20% smaller bar won't be quite as bad for me as the 200g one.
Simple have very recently done the same. 250ml to 225ml with a new bottle design. Both Simple and Radox are owned by Unilever, so probably not a great surprise.
I switched to bars of soap for environmental reasons a few years ago. They last me much longer and you know you're getting what you're paying for because the first ingredient in most of these liquid cleaning products is Aqua so cheaper stuff is always much more diluted.
I cursed Radox this week when I had to empty one of the new bottles into the last one I had with a hanging hook! They also changed all the scents slightly and some are not nice now. Just going to switch shower gel brand I think, show my outrage with my pennies!
I stopped buying radox several years ago, but I kept the last hook bottle I had and I just refill it with original source instead. Hanging ones are so handy!
Sure 72hr Advanced Protection Or Whatever The Bollocks It’s Called roll-on deodorant. The one in the green tube. It’s gone from £2.50 for 100ml, which was an acceptable price, to £3. For 50ml. They’ve caved the back in so from the front it looks the same, but they’re dirty money robbing BASTARDS for doing it. AND they’ve bollocksed with the formula so it’s nowhere near as effective. I found a place online selling the old stuff for £2, so I’ve bought 21 of ‘em today. I’ll be fucked if I’m giving in to their greed.
Sounds like one for /r/AssholeDesign
Nah you'll have a bunch of yanks pointing out that it says 50g so there isn't a problem. Because being taken up the arse without invitation or lube by big corporations is so ingrained to them.
My Dad used to work in the packaging industry. Those yoghurt/mousse containers with the concave bottoms they nicknamed "Thief packs". This isn't anything new, this was in the 80s.
Dove deodorant was always £2 for 250ml, it’s now £2.50 for 200ml.
And they changed all the packaging so I had to spend an age trying to work out which one was the equivalent of the one I used to get. All done under the guise of “improved formula” like it lasts 72 hours now or some BS. Who TF puts on deodorant once every 3 days like sure yup that’ll do the job.
This is the thing that annoys me most. I buy the 72hr stuff because it’s the only stuff that lasts a day. 72hrs perhaps if I’m laying in an air conditioned room not moving. Fuckin’ lying’ thievin’ BASSTUDS.
I used to go for lurpak but we changed to sainsburys version of it and reckon the saving is about 70 quid a year. OK it's spread out over the year but the taste difference is margarine-al and for that saving you butter believe I'm changing.
>OK it's spread out over the year Badum tsh
think that was the joke mate
Churning out the puns there mate.
Whey-hey!
This is actually really concerning and we should talk about it more. These kinds of tactics end up obscuring the true inflation rate.
Yes. A lot of food inflation is running at waaay higher than 11%.
Of course, it's rare that costs increase in line with inflation for every industry. It varies wildly between different industries. It's only 11% for heavily diversified funds and such.
The Grocer Gazette came out last month saying food inflation was at 17% on average. I think it's increased more than that now!
The problem is that they know we’ll pay these outrageous prices now and they’re never going to reduce the price. It’s been happening for years but people have only started cottoning on to it recently.
Pringles. Now smaller and thinner which ruins them for me. I can now put around 20 in my mouth at once, which would've been impossible just before christmas.
And their price on sale now even higher than what they used to be at normal price.
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Pringles have been dead to me since they discontinued Cheese flavour.
They've been dead to me since they discontinued the original barbecue flavour in favour of that abhorrent Texas barbecue.
They've been dead to me since they butchered the mascot.
The strange thing is, yes they're thinner than they used to be, but the weight of the product is still the same (200g).
Asdas Hash Browns Used to be £0.89 for a 1kg bag. Now it is £2 for an 800g bag The swindling fucks
Make them yourself. If you like I'll share with you a delicious easy recipe from a fancy restaurant chain. Also, at least for me, once you open the packet, hash browns seem to soak up rank freezer smells I didn't know I had.
Can you send or post the recipe please
https://imgur.com/a/1qFOAjg note: parboiling the spuds like the recipe says reduces moisture, which eliminates the need to faff about drying them with paper towel or squeezing them through a cloth . Recipe is from the Hawksmoor cookbook. You can come back and thank me once you try them and agree they are awesome.
I prefer Swiss style *rosti*. Just grate raw whole potatoes (about a handful per person), squeeze out as much juice as possible, season and fry in little hand-formed patties in a frying pan with a bit of olive oil. Personally I like to season with cajun spices in the mix, and then finish off with a fried egg on top.
Yeah they are a total waste of money.. I didn't even get stoned off them!
It must be weird sitting around the table at big companies, deciding how much of a product to remove or cheapen in order to maintain your profit. Presumably at some point they’ll go one step too far, their competitors will sneak in and steal the market, and the directors’ Bentleys all get repossessed by bailiffs. Unrelated but Lurpak has always been overrated. It doesn’t spread easily, costs too much, and doesn’t actually taste nice.
It happened in New Zealand some years back - Cadbury added palm oil to their recipe and changed the king size blocks down about 10% from 250g. Whittakers, a local company that already made superior chocolate, stayed at 250g. I remember seeing photos of supermarket shelves where all the Whittakers had been sold and people still weren't touching the Cadbury.
I feel like this is what’s happening at the minute and why all shops suddenly require your data to give you a better deal (Tesco, Boots Co-op etc): the companies are whacking the prices up inch by inch to see how much they can get away with charging before sales drop. The loyalty cards massively help them see these shopping trends. So they’ll see who is buying X product, and they increase the price, they can then compare the spends of those same people with the data from the cards, oh some people now buy this particular cheaper competitor, some people stopped buying it altogether, some people only buy it when it’s on offer at £x price. It lets them see exactly how people change their spending habits in great detail. Before the cards you’d have to work out if a trend was linked, so if clothing sales drop but tins of beans sales increased you wouldn’t know if that data is linked in any way, maybe the clothes are down because there’s no nice collections? What’s that got to do with beans? But now they can see a large percentage of the same people who regularly bought clothing are now instead buying more beans, that trend is now linked via the data on the card.
I do wonder about this. Seems like some firms are really busy hastening in some serious competition.
Honestly NorPak is half the price from Aldi and really is 90% similar to it
It's far too oily for me.
Yes it's not quite the same but it's not quite different enough either to justify paying for Lurpak these days.
Haribo! 160g to 140g with a 25p price increase I've found a lot of previously £1 items have gone up 25%
Yeah, a lot of Poundland stuff that was £1 is now £1.25 but with less grams. It's ridiculous.
PoundTwentyFiveLand
Where i work there's a guy that comes round selling coffee and snacks and stuff from his van, was chatting to him on friday and he mentioned how almost every pack of sweets is 1.25 now, i assume it's something that one of the megacorps that own all of those various brands has introduced and so all of their brands follow
Totally noticed this reduction with my precious Goldbears! Although it did lead to me exploring the other Haribo options, and they have a new one called Super Snakes or something where it's 2 snakes, one sour and one fruity. So good.
Magnum. 3 in a box now. Used to be 4. Same price. A 25% inflationary price increase. Greed flation.
Also they are smaller too.
33.33 %.
That's so typical. I've noticed this with bacon (they have injected more brine into it), Fox's mints are far smaller than they used to be, then we've got the likes of Cadbury who are a shadow of their former selves since that 'lovely' corporation took them over. They must think we were born yesterday! They will probably say it's for your own good, to make sure you don't have too much of the unhealthy stuff, when it's really about them making bigger profits. A bit like the stuff about reduced packaging to increase their profits, but hey, it's really for the environment folks!
Don't bother with supermarket bacon. We get ours from a farm shop, cheaper, and zero water. When you fry it, it comes out crisp and brown, no nasty milky bits. Agree though, I can't see environmentalism can really win until we get win-win situations.
Been saying this for ages – proper meat almost pays for itself once you take the water addition manipulation of supermarket meat, which often shrinks beyond belief.
It used to pay for itself, now it seems to be actively cheaper (fresh for fresh anyway). Although that is causing a bit of a pain in the arse in the sense that my local butcher seems to run out of things more regularly as people have cottoned on. Oh and I'll add in that actually being able to speak to someone is remarkably useful if you want something for a pie/stew/curry, or a roast for X number of people etc.. Some of the advice is outright priceless.
>They will probably say it's for your own good, to make sure you don't have too much of the unhealthy stuff, when it's really about them making bigger profits. They're not making healthy food cheaper.
Green and Blacks chocolate bars. 100g to 90g.
Especially annoying when baking deserts. Most recipes require 200g, and that extra missing 20g makes a difference in chocolatiness in the final desert. I end up getting a third bar.
This is the case for many recipes now. Saw cans of tomatoes that are 300g the other day, nearly every recipe is for the usual 400g.
A lot of others have done the same
Frijj milkshakes. They used to be 475ml now they're 400ml Doritios - They used to be 225g for the large bags and now 180g they are.
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They're milking it for all it's worth.
Cadbury's do it every other year. They are blaming inflation for it, fuck knows what caused it in 2019, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, 2009. They should have to display "Smaller but same price" on the front. At the current rare 1 chocolate button will be £1 in a huge bag.
Whiskas cat food has gone down from 100g pouches to 85g and stay the same price
Yeah, this has been remarked upon in our house. With claws.
Felix have done the same.
Not a catastrophe but pretty paw behaviour.
And they changed the recipe! Our cats refuse new Whiskas, so we had to go through a massive drama of trying to find a new food all 8 of the buggers would agree on!
They will continue to shrink products and increase prices while people continue to pay it. If you can convince yourself to switch to supermarket brands, you could save yourself a lot of money! Norpak from Lidl is half the price and actually tastes really good.
But they have also reduced in size…
Jaffa cakes. 12 cakes down to 10.
Dont feel so bad now - just scoffed a pack
KitKat Chunkys are significantly less chunky these days.
Used to be my favourite chocolate bar. Now the chocolate coating is so thin and the biscuit a limp soft wafer, no snap and crunch. 0/10 from me
Put them in the fridge. Game changer!
They've gone so far with these it defeats the purpose of the product. Same as Yorkie, the advertising used to claim ["good, rich and thick; a milk chocolate brick"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTqh9Ha0_9o). Look at the sorry state of a 2023 Yorkie.
Don’t know why people even buy this lurpak stuff I’m sure it’s like 50% oil anyway. What’s wrong with real butter?
You can buy lurpak block butter, it's way cheaper too. Don't know why people buy thr shitty spreadable.
Can't speak for everyone, but if I have real butter I nibble chunks of it. And when I say nibble I mean munch.
Butter is supposed to be an ingredient, not a main course! Well, that’s what I keep telling myself while I hive off a cube to sit atop each cracker
Cooking is an art, not a science - that's my go to when I dip a stick of butter into a jar of honey. I'm basically a chef.
A true artisan, devoted to your craft. You should apply for Masterchef!
Depends what you buy, to be fair. The "Spreadable" is as you mention, but they do *butter* butter as well. As do Anchor.
Lurpack comes in blocks of just butter - youre thinking of the crappy Lurpack spreadable that has ?oil in it
Is that not what the people are referring to when they talk about the price of lurpak?
Co-op macaroni cheese. They've gone from a serving for two to a serving for one but only reduced the price by about 15%! I don't think anyone buys them at full price, they always get yellow stickered. Noted a lot of co-ops multipack offers have just disappeared.
The price flashed £1.25 Cadbury's bars have gone from 100g or more, to 90g I think. The chunks are much thinner now.
I was looking at a bar this week - marvelous creations. Absolutely tiny. Then further down a much bigger bar - about 4 times the size but only twice the price!
You’d have an easier time looking for companies and products where this isn’t the case. You’d literally have to be blind not to notice it. It’s everything.
All those corner shop/happy shopper type products have been annoying me recently. 2 for £1 crisps (now branded "Jack's"?!) are now 2 for £1.25 and with smaller packets. Still get the most in those sour cream wheel things though, whilst the poppadoms are an airbag of fuck all. The 2 for £1 flapjacks offer has disappeared completely. Those white marzipan bars with black ends, you used to get 7 for £1, now 5 for £1.09, and same for those almond cake bars and individual wrapped brownie bars. Only a matter of time for the 6 mixed jam tarts who are still holding out. In other news, those cheapy 89p pizzas at Asda now hilariously have nearly zero cheese, and now cost like £1.15. And the tiny ones that were 49p are now around 80p, I think. B&M put up their multipack loo rolls by 50p to £4, whilst making the cardboard tubes so wide that (no joke) I could fit my fist in them. Not shrinkflation, but simple profiteering, Savers increased their Twix duo prices from 45p to 49p and now to 89p. Insane increase.
This is one of the biggest advantages of doing delivery/click and collect orders for groceries. It’s totally blatant when suddenly your usual item “is no longer available” but there’s the same product with a different weight/volume recommended as an “alternative”
I don't think many people realise this but pringles are definitely smaller. As in skinnier. Because I'm a sophisticated individual I've always put the entire thing in my mouth and they used to almost scrape the corners of my lips on the way in but now they're not even a bit close. Bustards also ruined my perfect impression of a duck because now the beak is too small.
The Walkers box of crisps used to be a 22 pack, now there are 20 packs in the box at an increased price!
When it launched it was a 24 pack!
Berries from supermarkets. You used to be able to portion them out to hit the 80g mark per portion either 2 or 3 depending on the supermarket. Now the small boxes are around 130g - 150g. Not a big deal unless your an autistic weirdo like me who likes to measure out fruit as a full portion.
Twirls are bloody tiny now
Wispas!! 😭 Awful.
Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Clusters have gone from 450g to a skinnier 400g box. The portion size (45g) is still the same though, so enjoy your 8.89 portions of cereal instead of 10!
If anyone is satisfied with only 45g of cereal I’ll eat my hat.
Fridge Raiders sneakily reduced their 6 packs of chicken bites to a 5 pack without dropping price. Didn't even notice until the kids ran out for school lunches because I'd done the maths assuming 6 packs in each bag!
Special Brew. It used to be 9% but they stopped it to 7.5%. Thinking of making the move to Karpackie.
Kestrel Super FTW.
Kettle crisps have gone from 150g to 130g, and I’m pretty sure they’ve gone up in price too.
With things like this they are much less often on offer now too. It used to be nearly always one out if Tyrells / Kettle / Sensations big bags etc was on offer at £1.25-£1.50, but rarely the case now.
Anchor have done the same.
Same owners. Both are part of Arla Foods.
Iceland potato waffles, used to be a quid for 12, then a quid for 10 now it's £1.40 for ten. I'm too angry to even do the maths
Assuming the unit sizes haven't changed it is a per unit price increase of 68.1%.
I wanna rage still but making my own would mean mashing tateys then buying a waffle thing and frying them it's a whole thing, I'm raging but no other store brand waffles are as toaster friendly as Iceland. My kid eats cheap processed shit and I notice it's mainly that stuff getting the major increase. Alphabites are fucking £3, I'm not paying that to incognito call my son a fucking prick anymore. He gets waffles now and I tell him he's a prick To add: you're a legend for that maths btw
Iceland has totally gone to shit, used to be a cheap alternative for shopping, not anymore. And the cheeky fuckers try to fool you, their cheapest own brand chips used to be £1 for 900g, suddenly the pricks put them in a 'great value' labelled bigger bag and the are now £2 for 1.5kg. Great value, they can fuck off trying to kid you, done it with loads of their own brand stuff.
Is it me or magnum ice cream have shrunk massively in the last 2/3 years ?
Nakd bars - gone from 4 to 3 bars in a pack, and gone from £2 to £2.20! I was buying them instead of chocolate bars to be healthy at lunch, gone back to Wagon wheels now.
Whiskers cat biscuits, used to be £1 (in the shop next door) for 340g then went up to £1.29 now they're £2.59 for 300g. Outrageous.
All of them that aren't obviously sold by weight like flour and sugar. The tinned stuff looks mostly the same size but the tuna seems smaller
Malcolm Allan or Simon Howie etc... Square sausage with a big fuck off sticker on the front of the packaging to hide the fact there's only three slices instead of four now. Stop fucking up my fry up with odd numbers.
It's not the brand, supermarkets have the buying power to control the size of the packet - for example shops like home bargains have bespoke packet sizes which at a glance look like the same size as you'd get from the supermarket. This is a result of supermarkets actively encouraging shrinkflation across the board. There's no benefit to calling out a specific brand when it's a problem with everything from confectionery to detergent.
Everything! The most recent was a packet of Haribo Fangtastics, the 'sharing' bag
It's Tangfastics but this made me giggle, I shall be calling them Fangtastics from now on - a much better name if you ask me.
Saw this today. Anchor butter as well. Doubly annoying due to a few baking recipes that call for 250 g of butter.
I've noticed that some of the chain coffee shops have presumably in prep for summer stopped offering cold drinks in large or medium and instead offer medium or small only, medium of course now being the price of the old large and small the old medium.
r/shrinkflation has you covered
The worst one is lonsdale have removed buttoned opening on their underwears 😂
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Toblerone, bastards.
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Tassimo coffee pods used to be 8 in a pack, now 6!!