Up untill a week ago Nofrills carried these “three packs” of salmon for $10. Now the same pack contains two for the same $10. I thought it felt light when I bought it yesterday.
This comes to about $0.02 increase per gram, and a $1.10 price increase overall. Or a 11% increase in price overall. Meanwhile inflation is at 6-7%?
Same reason for every animal resource: over exploitation of the resource, habitat destruction/pollution, and climate change. This isn’t a recent thing, salmon stocks have been declining over the last 4 decades. The response to this decline of course has been to continue extracting the same amount year over year.
Atlantic Salmon populations have been doing fine and have an LC conservation status. Most of the issues with other salmon are in the populations off of the US West Coast.
Alaska has been seeing their populations increase in large part due to government hatcheries and wildlife management.
Some countries have outlawed this behavior. If the seller/producer wants to decrease the package contents and keep the package size and price the same, they can (of course), but they must write on the package that the contents have decreased in large bright characters that are hard to miss. Something like this:
255g now 200g
I’m not sure where you are (assuming USA, based on the packaging), but it’s not illegal in the USA, since consumer protection is near to nonexistent.
Pretty sure this is Canada, no frills is a franchise chain under Loblaws. Loblaws is the kind of company that increases a product price by 20% and then puts up a “same price everyday” sign to gaslight customers.
I’m totally with you that shrinkflation is an issue.
But these nofrills packages are intentionally priced at an even value like $10. to the point that the price is written directly on the package not an in store label that they can update. I get things like chicken and sausage patties like this too. So instead of putting in 3 and updating the price to $15 or whatever they just take one out.
Additionally fish is not a staple good, generally fish is sold at “market price” because it’s affected by populations and seasons and prices for fish vary significantly through the years because of this.
But again I agree and the best thing to do is pay attention and not buy things that you don’t think are worth.
They also print the weight and number of pieces on the package, which they had to update. Since the packaging is otherwise identical, shoppers will buy it without reading the weight of number of pieces because it looks exactly like the old package.
Obviously, No Frills wanted to keep the price at $10, so they reduced the amount of fish in the package. That’s shrinkflation. If the goal were to keep customers informed of the change, they would have made more noticeable change to the package.
While these price changes can certainly come in part from corporate greed, there may be some other costs at work being applied; the increased difficulty of agriculture in a world where the climate is getting out of control, or as someone else mentioned the war in Ukraine having an effect on agricultural exports from the area.
I’m at least trying to be flexible in my preferences. I try to be aware of the carbon offset associated to the food I buy, or the amount of land needed to produce it. We can also get a bit too used to certain foods actually being subsidized by the government, primarily meats. It doesn’t necessarily mean I can eat cheaply, but sometimes I pick up an option I wouldn’t normally consider that either saves me money or satisfies me even more.
The cost increase is one thing, like you said there may be valid reasons why pricing for these particilar salmons increased more than inflation did. The disgusting part here is in my opinion the sneaky way its done: by shrinking the package you are (again in my opinion) lying to the consumer by leading them to believe you are paying the same as you were before, as the package looks mostly the same.
I want to say this is one of the more obtuse examples of shrinkflation. A lot of it is simply to allow a product, usually something by weight like cereal (where you’re not getting x individual pieces), to completely sell out, only to be replaced with one with nominally fewer grams of product while maintaining price. Usually with a 2-3 week gap between the old product and new. Usually it will come back with a redesigned box or something or new “eco” packaging that helps to distract from the fact that they just performed a 10%+ moneygrab on your lucky charms. Most people are content to just be able to buy the product again, and since it’s been completely sold out with no product to compare with, there’s less of a chance anyone is going to be able to have something to directly compare to when buying the updated product.
If they had instead sold 3x fillets at 200g, I have serious doubts even you would have noticed; but since they moved to larger, but fewer fillets, it’s starkly obvious that something happened.
The thing that pisses me off the most is “””eco-friendly””” companies doing shrinkflation. My guy, you can tell me it’s recycled plastic or whatever, if the portions are smaller you’re still pumping out more plastic than before, asshole.
It’s like that episode of Next Generation “Remember Me” when the universe is shrinking and everyone’s disappearing and the Enterprise computer keeps gaslighting Dr Crusher trying to convince her it’s fine, everything’s fine, this is totally normal. But it’s not fine, it really isn’t.
Will at least all our problems of overweight, diabetes and clogged arteries be solved in a few years? Or will most of us be dead by that time? I fear the latter…
I’m sorry, what? The entire American west is becoming unlivable, Canada is burning to ashes, poisoning tens of millions of people across the continent, a hirricane just hit Californis, an entire fucking city just got wiped off the map in Hawaii, and western Europe is going to go into freefall when the impending collapse of tbe Atlantic currents drastically ravages their climate.
But sure, tell me more about how being in a developed country is going to save us when there’s no fucking food and everything is on fire.
That’s certainly a revision of what you said earlier. So now you have to not only be financially sound, in a premier country, but also not say, anywhere near the southern US or any flammable forests?
Well, this specifically being smoked wild salmon, it’s not really problematic in that health sense (farmed salmon, on the other hand, has way much more fat and because of what it’s fed, that’s not even the good fat with lots of Omega-3) except perhaps any slightly hgher cancer risks associated with the smoking process (also it depends on any kind of chemicals added to accelerate the “smoking” - you can actually add “smoked flavour” - and preservatives).
Ah yes, the US Fed causing inflation in all of Europe and Canada too. It’s crazy how the Fed made inflation lower here at home though. I don’t know how they do that without there being some kind of series of global supply shocks.
Lol yeah the person who replied didn’t know what nofrills was but the bank of Canada also increased total money supply similar to how the us federal reserve did.
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