Big Food considers corporate chicanery to be a legitimate
business practice.
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| The packaging "shrink ray" robs consumers |
Mothers the world over
have told their children a zillion times: “Stop playing with your food!”
I now share their
frustration. I’d like to yell at the conglomerate packagers of America’s
victuals: “Stop playing with our food!”
Actually, they’re
playing with our heads, using dishonest packaging tactics to raise their prices
without us noticing it.
A 16-ounce carton of
something quietly slips to 14 ounces. But, shhhh, it doesn’t drop in price.
Then there’s the
dimple trick. A jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, for example, has had its contents shrunk,
yet the new jar looks as big as the old one unless you turn it on its end.
There you’ll find a big indention in the bottom — a hidden way to shrink the
capacity of the jar and give you less for your money.
Instead of an
eight-ounce package selling for $3.89, suddenly a box of Baker’s contained only four ounces of
chocolate, which sells for
$2.89. Wow: that’s nearly a 50 percent price hike per ounce. What gives?
“The change was
consumer-driven,” the Kraft Foods spokeswoman craftily replied. “Our
consumers have told us that they prefer this [smaller] size.”
Uh, sure, said Segal,
but what about that slippery price? She was equally slippery, declaring that
the product “is competitively priced.” That wasn’t the question, but her whole
game is to avoid giving the honest answer: “We’re gouging our customers.”
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is
a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He's also editor of the
populist newsletter, The
Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org