In a world where every product sucks due to years of cost cutting and shrinkflation, brands mean very little.
Not only is the shit expensive, but may as well eat a bowl of ice cream with as much sugar as a lot of cereal has. Having cereal for breakfast daily is akin to using soda for hydration. It sure tastes good, but I’ve cut down on my cereal intake for multiple reasons.
So true, and worse, most cereal is just carbs to begin with!
Basically your breakfast is sugar on sugars.
The one brand that I am seeing rise in price for me is Spindrift.
I was just thinking the other day that their business model has got to be a lot more supply chain and energy dependent than many of the “fizzy waters”.
For those who don’t know, its a low calorie soda because its simply real juice in small quantities as the flavoring.
So they must have to source fresh fruits, then extract them, then pasteurize everything, and only then make the soda.
I don’t drink a lot of it, but its about the only soda I am willing to give the kids.
Framing this as a customer loss is funny. Switching brands means it’s the brands that are losing, geniuses.
I would abandon the brands I currently use, but Great Value is as cheap as it gets
Facts.
I quit drinking soda this month because the off-brand soda I like inexplicably stop being sold by every store in the area, probably due to the Iran War, and RC Cola, Pepsi, and Coke all cost the same gouged prices. I could just take the price gouging and buy them anyway, but I’d rather quit consuming it out of spite.
That it’s healthier is just a side bonus.
That’s actually great news. Sugar is a hell of a drug and quitting soda is a big step in less sugar consumption. I enjoy water and hot tea usually at work, but my co-workers love soda. One of them got a kidney stone and the doctor told her it’s because you were drinking 5 cans of soda a day.
Hell yeah. :)
Oh no! Those poor brands!
I think there was a really interesting part right at the bottom that was briefly mentioned. A lot of people are using A.I. to shop now. Probably not the Lemmy demographic. But people are willing to trust the A.I. when it gives them a recommendation, even if it’s for a new brand they’ve never heard of before. This is an unprecedented level of marketing if the numbers in the article are correct. No advertising can compete with “artificial word of mouth” directly changing a customer’s opinion.
My prediction is companies will notice this, fast, and there will be incentives for A.I. to become like a new advertising platform. How much do you think Grok can charge to recommend one product over the other if it can have such a high (near 40%) lead conversion?
404 media has an interesting podcast episode on “AEO” (AI SEO) and how it can be manipulated. Apple link
So it’s like SEO then. It’s always been a scammers game. Blast sites with bot comments about your site, write slop articles that merge things that have nothing to do with what they are named for the sake of SEO, add tags, and specific words through the page. This is just an extension of the scum.
I find Aldi and Lidl have healthier variants of namebrand cereals.
Cereal prices killed me. I went to generics which were fine and then they got too expensive. So I learned to make my own, sugar smacks are really easy to make and taste WAY better. Plus you can tweak the recipe like I add toasted almonds in mine, local honey, etc.
Jerky was the other, bought a dehydrator and wait for skirt to be on sale. I have a clone of Wild Bills and I’m good to go.
And you can do so much more w/ a dehydrator. Veggie? You can make awesome fruit strips/etc
vote with your money, if a company or brand doesn’t respect you or fight for your business then starve them out
Fuck brands. Buy less shit.
Fuck pointless consumption!
Capitalism cannibalising itself one brand at a time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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I stopped buying cereal years before covid. A recent trip to the grocery store took me through the cereal aisle and I happened to stop to pay closer attention. The shrunken boxes and jacked up prices were very apparent. Yet another reason not to buy that unhealthy trash.
I only buy specific cereal, and only when it is on sale, because my wife and daughter have celiacs disease and their options for “easy” food are fairly limited. Cheerios and Chex are essentially all I buy and only when they on a significant sale.
Yet another reason not to buy that unhealthy trash.
ButButBut it’s part of this complete breakfast!
Gestures broadly at the huge array of breakfast items on the table of which the cereal is a minor component
almost ever chain i go to, nobody visits the cereal aisle ever, they know its just pure sugar in a box. they opted for the “healthier” foods. the only people that buy cereal, are people with children or is addicted to the even more sugary granola cereal.
You people have such a small world. There are plenty of healthy cereals. Especially if you’re looking for more fiber, which isthe single largest deficiency in diet that we have in Western nations.
Y’all see one fucking reddit post and treat it like gospel 🤣
