Companies Cheating Us with Smaller Packages

It's been going on for a long time. Once upon a time, the smaller size box of tissues was 200 tissues. Then at one point it was 140. Now it's 120 or 110.

Yogurt containers at one time were all 8 ounces. Then one major brand switched to 6 ounces and then all the others followed suit. I recently noticed my "Greek-style" yogurt container was 5.3 ounces—which is 12% less than even 6 ounces.

The big container of ice cream, which we were used to calling a "half-gallon," is now 1.5 quarts—one-quarter less. (Apologies to my non–U.S. readers for the U.S. units of measure. The point, of course, is the comparison of the amounts.)

Paper for many years was bought and sold by the "ream," which is 500 sheets. I recently bought a big package of paper—and only when I got it home did I notice that it's 400 sheets, not 500.

And of course these smaller sizes are not being sold at proportionately lower prices. No, it's less product for the same price—the manufacturer's way of raising the price--hopefully, and frequently, without our noticing.

Worse, some containers are deliberately made to deceive. I complained to a certain food store chain that their house-brand hummus came in a container with a convex bottom, so that the container held less than it looked like. They wrote back claiming that the container shape was for the sake of the physical strength of the container. I'm skeptical.

Recently I bought a small frozen pizza that came in a box. When I opened the box, the diameter of the pizza inside was 2" less than the size of the box! Can there be any doubt that this is deliberate deception?

This is a bit off-topic--not concerning smaller container sizes--but there is a mattress widely advertised on TV, where you can adjust the firmness with a remote control whereby you dial in a setting from 0 to 100.

However, the increments of adjustment are by 5's--0, 5, 10, etc. In other words, there are actually 20 steps of adjustment. Why don't they make the control go 0, 1, 2--up to 20? Because (as they rightly believe), we feel there is a greater range of adjustment if it goes up to 100 than if it goes up to 20.

So all these guys are making money--because they are smarter than we are! I'd like to wake up one day and find that everybody had gotten smarter overnight, and these petty ruses and deceptions wouldn't work anymore.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein