Shrinkflation: This is how consumers are duped – “Nasty tricks”
Created: 08/08/2022, 17:28
By: Patricia Huber
More and more food manufacturers are reducing their product size - the price remains the same.
The hidden price increase fools consumers.
Munich/Bonn – The prices for groceries and the like continue to rise.
According to calculations by the Federal Statistical Office, the inflation rate remains high.
But inflation is not always visible to consumers at first glance.
Price traps lurk here, especially in the supermarket.
With the so-called shrinkflation, the rising prices are cleverly covered up by the manufacturers.
Higher costs: Shrinkflation wave not yet peaked
The gummy bear pioneer Haribo recently made headlines with just that.
The Bonn confectionery producer has announced that it will reduce the pack size of the gold bears - but the price remains the same.
That means: for 99 cents you will only get 175 instead of 200 grams of gold bears in the future.
Hence the term shrinkflation, which is made up of the English term for shrinking and the word inflation.
Not only Haribo argues the change with higher production costs.
Many companies have already stated that the consequences of the Ukraine war and the coronavirus pandemic have led to sharply increased costs.
Armin Valet, an expert for food at the Hamburg consumer advice center, explains to the
Handelsblatt
: "The shrinkflation wave will only really be felt in six months." This is because the changeover in packaging sizes and filling quantities is not possible overnight.
This is annoying for consumers.
After all, the price increase is not immediately recognizable.
After all, you know the prices of your favorite products better than the exact filling quantity.
"Very few buyers notice when the chocolate bar only weighs 90 instead of 100 grams or when there are only nine handkerchiefs in the pack instead of ten," consumer goods expert Christoph Driver explains to the
Handelsblatt.
Double trick: smaller packaging and higher price
Consumer advocate Valet makes it clear that "shrinkflation" is not prohibited.
"It's still a nasty trick to fool consumers," he says.
But it gets even worse: many manufacturers are reducing the size of the pack and increasing the price.
The
Handelsblatt
has also identified examples of this.
For example, the Vernel fabric softener packaging has shrunk from 900 to 850 milliliters, while the price in the supermarket has risen from 1.79 euros to 1.99 euros.
The snack manufacturer Intersnack proceeded in the same way with the Ültje peanuts, as did Kleenex with its cosmetic tissues in the cube box.
Prices have gone up or stayed the same while pack sizes have shrunk.
But that's not all the tricks manufacturers use to fool buyers.
A popular method is also to change the recipe of the products.
In this way, expensive ingredients are replaced by cheaper ones.
The quality goes down, the price stays the same.
(ph)
