Thursday Thirteen

One of the things I've noticed for a while now is the decrease in products that I buy, as in, there is less of what used to be in the box.

This is nothing new. It's cyclic and we've gone through this before. I remember when Pop-Tarts were made smaller sometime in the 1990s and I boycotted Pop-Tarts for years in protest. (Now I cannot stand them; they taste like cardboard. Were they that bad when I was a kid and I loved them?)

The eggheads who run things call this "shrinkflation," which is where you are paying about the same price you were for a widget, but the widget is smaller. So here are 13 things I've noticed that are now less in size but cost around the same.

1. Nestle Semi-Sweet Chocolate bags dropped from 12 oz (down from the original 16 oz) to 10 oz. It doesn't matter so much if you're making chocolate chip cookies, but it played havoc with my fudge-making capabilities last winter, as all of my recipes call for the larger amount of chocolate.

2. Dove Sensitive Skin Soap was one of the first "shrinkflation" items I noticed, as suddenly I was going through a bar of soap much more quickly than I used to. I checked and sure enough the old bars I had under the kitchen sink were 4 oz, while the new bars in the bathroom were 3.75 oz. That's about a week's worth of washing in that quarter ounce.

3. Honey Nut Cheerios boxes have gone from 12 oz to 10.8 oz. I prefer the smaller boxes anyway; no one eats this but me and by the time I get to the middle of a family-sized box they are starting to taste stale. Cereal is quite expensive now, though. I only buy it when it's on sale.

4. Candy bars are smaller. I can tell this mostly by the calories, because they used to be 240 calories and now, they're 220. Some are even less. The loss of calories is good, but the candy costs more for less. Some of it doesn't taste as good as it did, either. I don't know what they've changed in some of the recipes for candy bars, but they did themselves no favors. (Cadbury Eggs grew smaller a few years ago, and this past year I think they were smaller still. So small, in fact, that I couldn't justify the 50 cents for them. They also don't taste as good as they once did.)

5. Nature Valley bars. I eat the cashew ones, and they are not as long as they used to be. They're about 1 bite less.

6. Potato chips have changed bag size. A lot of chips have dropped from 9.75 oz bags to 9.25 oz bags, or some variation thereof. And the price of chips is through the roof; we have started cutting back on our consumption of these. We shouldn't be eating them anyway.

7. Bounty paper towels have dropped from 165 sheets to 147 sheets. I don't know why they didn't do a round number, like drop it to 145 sheets. Weird.

8.  Sun Maid Raisins are now in a 9 oz box when it used to be a 12 oz box for about the same price. Doesn't matter so much in the recipes I use, but it does matter in some things. 

9. Some toothpaste has dropped from 4.1 oz to 3.8 oz. That's probably a week's worth of toothbrushing, like the Dove soap. Essentially these drops in personal care items mean you end up purchasing at least one more item a year than you would have at the old larger size.

10. Coffee has dropped from a 2 pound can to a 1.9 oz can. Fortunately, only my husband drinks coffee and he only has one cup a day.

11. Sugar is no longer in a 5-pound bag; it's in a 4-pound bag.

12. Ice cream used to come in 1/2-gallon (2 quart) containers; now the containers hold 1.44 quarts.

13. Trash bags have changed in number in the boxes. Hefty bags went from 90 to 80 in a box. I suspect the same goes for Zip-loc and other bags, but I haven't paid attention to that. I try not to use those in favor of non-disposable storage containers.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 867th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway. (It's really more than that, but I've put some of them away, never to be seen again.)