Squat Squeeze

Have you noticed that orange juice containers are looking a bit more squat these days? That's because many brands, including Trader Joe's pictured here, have shrunk their OJ containers from 64 ounces (a half gallon) to 52 ounces. Orange juice containers are going the way of the ice cream container.

 

Trader Joe's has insisted in their podcast, that their markup on items remains the same even as prices rise. 

"[W]e don't change our prices unless our costs change, period," said the company's Matt Sloan in a spring 2020 podcast. "And we are loath to raise retail prices." 

Markup is one thing. Package sizes are apparently another.

 

 

A Cup Above

While so many coffee companies have shrunk the size of their packaging to 14, 12 and even 10 ounces in light of ShrinkFlation, today we salute the coffee companies where a pound is still a pound. Among them is Dean's Beans of Orange, Mass. Their coffee is pretty damn good, too.Stay strong, Dean and don't give in to the urge to shrink your packaging. We are with you!

Farfalle Fail

Just as surely as you could count on the sun rising in the east and the swallows returning to Capistrano, you could count on a box of pasta to be one pound. Well, not anymore! Ronzoni has trimmed the contents of some of its boxes by a quarter! I recently had to make a special trip to the store, when I realized the pound of bow ties I thought I had for pasta salad, was in fact only 12 ounces. Here's the new vs. old package.

Wipeout

I hate to call out Costco, because I love their products and their company culture, but here we have the magically shrinking toilet paper rolls. The first image is of an older Kirkland Signature six pack of toilet paper. Each roll has 425 sheets, totaling 318.7 square feet.

The newer bath tissue package has six rolls containing 380 sheets totaling 285 square feet. That's 270 fewer sheets per six pack. That's nearly an entire role!