I have Zero brand loyalty. Best ingredients for the lowest price gets the sale.
Keep in mind that most off-brand products are literally the same brand name product in a different container.
In Canada we have a few off brand labels like No Name and Compliments. Take ketchup for example. The off-brand ketchup is literally the same brand name Heinz or French’s it’s sitting beside, but for $1.50 cheaper. That’s because the off brand companies like Wal Mart and Loblaws pay for production cycle time at the main plants. So a run of Heinz ketchup will actually be a run of No Name ketchup. Heinz gets more money for the use of production time than they would selling that line of their own brand ketchup.
If you’re brand loyal to something, you’re just willing to pay more for a name, not the thing you want. Sour cream, mayo, toothpaste, even soap is all the exact same as the brand name stuff you’re buying.
Most of the time you can tell where it came from by the production stamp. All companies have their own number so the no name ketchup would have the same product number stamp as the brand name one because it came from the same facility.
The recipe is different for the store brand. I did this stuff in the dairy industry for a while. Its not production cycles in dairy, it’s vats. So store brand orders a few vats of product, with way lay less actual milk or doesnt specify as high a minimum quality milk products. More dyes and filler during finishing and no aging. All store brands are essentially flavored and colored mozzarella. They are lower quality.
I still buy them though. Mozzarella is good enough for most recipes.
For other products it’s similar. Lower tolerances on inputs and outputs to reduce cost. Still probably 80% as good as name brand.
I’ve worked in a few of these production lines and they’re literally just changing the packaging at the end of production. The packages could be different enough to change taste or texture but the product itself is identical.
Most store brands come from the same manufacturers as brand name products, they just change the packaging.
I have loyalty to higher prices if they treat their employees right. I’m willing to shell out an extra dollar if it means the employees aren’t getting paid shit an hour
Sure, but most of the time in this capitalist hellscape your options are shit and slightly different colored shit.
Slightly different colored is a pretty big statement — you can get the same service from a company that pays the workers $45 an hour or one that pays them $22… That’s a life vs working under the thumb of a company. It’s a very large difference between the good and the bad. Capitalism is everything trending towards shit inevitably, but that does not mean that every individual business is shit. It just means someday they will become shit.
My only loyalty is to brands that have higher quality than the competitors. And that only last as long as they are maintaining their quality or another brand is increasing their quality.
What about Uncle Sam cereal? It’s gone now, bought by a big cereal company and nearly immediately shut down, but there was nothing as fibrous and un-sugared on the American cereal market as that. Oh, sigh, Uncle Sam.
I mean, I wouldn’t care what brand it was if there were anything comparable. But given that it was the only one like it, I was extremely loyal.
Surely, more capitalism will fix this.
“We’re losing money. People aren’t buying our products anymore! What should we do?”
Shrink the size of the product and increase the cost. That will clearly be the solution!
Another option is to buy the alternative product and cancel it.
If only we got rid of the entire government and form an Ancapistan paradise here in America, then companies will lower their prices as the invisible hand just happens to do its thing. /j
- Brands increase prices
- People stop buying brands
- Brands cry foul
- Oh no! Anyway…
The trick, William Potter, is to bleed the people just enough to satiate your parasitism without exsanguinating them, eh?
Gee, we’ve never seen that trick before.
I stopped buying products that went from chocolate to chocoly
Hmmm, if only there was something those companies could do to retain customers. Something like lower prices without shrinking sizes?
This article felt a bit like AI click bait. Seems like they were really more interested in talking about AI and providing a link to [redacted]'s AI site. When writing an article about price hikes, why would you take a quote from a CEO pitching his AI site? Why not talk to actual consumers or even better yet CEO’s of companies that are gouging us, or companies that are providing lower priced items. And what about stores, nothing said about them yet they are not innocent in this, nothing about them in the article.
Quite a few years ago.
I abandoned many brands many years ago. They provide me nothing of value so I don’t give them my money.
I abandoned those type brands decades ago. Advertise on TV? You’re off the purchase list
““Do I really care if I’m getting the really cool olive oil brand?” Jones said.”
Jones should open their eyes, use their brain and buy the grapeseed oil instead. Jones should also have a first name.
I don’t know man I just eat whatever Grocery Outlet allows me to
The few brands I’ve stopped buying were because they do business in Pissrael
Capitalism cannibalising itself one brand at a time.
Fuck brands. Buy less shit.
Fuck pointless consumption!
“abandon their favorite brands” is a hell of a way to rephrase “can’t afford to continue eating what they have been previously”. Glad to see it reframed in a way that makes the companies seem like victims.
Thats like when we see headlines like “gen z are destroying the alcohol industry”
I honestly can’t trust any brands and their packaging because of shrinkflation.
Eveytime I go into a grocery store i see packaging stay the same size but the amount inside the packages keeps getting smaller and smaller.
In the image below for example now frozen fruits come 50% less filled, and the price has gone up from the originally 600g.
I think this may be a bad example. Different fruits are not necessarily sold in the same weights. Fresh strawberries are typically sold in heavier containers than a container of raspberries, and have been for a long time. Raspberries are just a more expensive fruit.
Exactly what I was thinking. Large strawberries are pretty uniformly cheap for me. Much less so for raspberries, blueberries, etc.
If we want to complain about the state of things fabrications make our arguments less trustworthy the moment they come out of our mouths.
Uh… those are two different fruits. If you are going to compare packing to measure shrinkflation, shouldn’t you be using the same product?
I’d say “That’s Loblaw’s for you” but the other day I was in Costco, and even THEIR packages have shrunk. You still have to buy a pack of 6, but it doesn’t weigh as much.
Oddly though, a 1kg bag of oats is still a 1kg bag of oats… just more expensive.
Bob Lablaw of the Lablaw Law firm and Bob Loblow Law Blog takes issue with your hasty generalization.
Same, I usually compare the net weight and amount of servings in a package vs the other brands nowadays.
There are definitely brands I stopped buying due to shrinkflation. A few times I’ve seen shrinkflated items on sale later and then do the math just to realize the price is still too stupid to buy even at sale price.
Fr fr
My favorite shrinkflation is Campbell’s soup, particularly their low-sodium offerings. Costs twice as much, comes in a slightly smaller can, and isn’t condensed. So you pay five times as much for them to just not put so much fucking salt into their soup in the first place.
Making soups has become a really fulfilling one of my cooking challenges I set myself. Tinkering with veg soup and getting slightly different variations each time has been a journey. Extra bonus is there’s always tons so there is always some in the freezer for days I cannot be bothered.
The one that burns me is whipped Cream Cheese - bigger container but less product in it at the same price as solid. And damn them, I prefer it with the air in it.
Even just regular cream cheese. It’s $8 for a 12 oz. tub of Philadelphia brand but $1.50 for an 8 oz foil-wrapped blocked of the generic. For years now I’ve been buying the generic blocks and packing them into old Philadelphia tubs because my parents insist on the name brand. They’ve never said a word about it.
I’m sure you could make your own whipped cream cheese with a food processor.
Are you comparing the two package sizes? One has strawberries and one has raspberry’s….
That is like… well comparing strawberries to raspberries they are totally different… I would assume packaging and pricing would be different.
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