Pet peeve: Shrinking consumer foods.

I know, I know. There’s so much bad out there, this seems pretty trivial in comparison. But it still bugs me. Like shaky cams really bug me. And if I were president, the latter would be among my first executive orders: No more shaky cams.

But ever shrinking consumer portions ticks me off too. For several reasons. First off, I think it’s a pretty sleazy thing to do, to try to trick people like that, and there has to be collusion along industry lines, cuz you see it everywhere. For instance, ice cream. It used to be a half gallon. Take a look now. It’s 1.5 quarts. And yogurt? Used to be eight ounces. Then it shrunk to 6 ounces. Yesterday evening, I purchased Chobani Yogurt (on sale at Costco) and it’s 5.3 ounces now. You pretty much can’t find eight ounce yogurt anymore . . . though you can find the 32 ounce size at times.

Candy bars? Same thing. They’re all smaller than they were ten years ago. So, we’re paying more for less. Workers get less pay for more work, and we consumers pay more for less, and more and more of the things we buy involve our own labor in the mix, too. Not only do we pay more for less, we also have (little by little) taken over aspects of the other side of the exchange (labor). . . which likely started with pumping our own gas.

It’s all become normalized. Like fighting our way through endless phone trees to get to the “right” worker on the other end, when, really, that should be the company’s job from the getgo. Not ours. Or, “managing” our own accounts online. Yeah, it appears to offer us “convenience,” but at what cost? Lost jobs and our own additional workload in the mix.

There just aren’t that many more places for capitalism to shift costs to the consumer (and society). They’re mostly maxed out. But they have to keep doing this, cuz the “natural” course of events is for profits to shrink over time if they don’t “innovate” in these ways. If they don’t screw over workers, push costs off to credit cards, second and third mortgages, tax cuts, privatization, “third world” workforces, the future, and endlessly shrinking quality and quantity in the products themselves . . . . they can’t make profits.

In short, it’s not really so trivial after all.