We keep our coffee in a metal coffeecan we like; it housed some premium coffee gifted to us more than decade ago, and we like the can... plus it's much easier to keep the loose coffee in a can than trying to keep it and load it from a bag.
It's also cool that the original coffee was 12.6 ounces, meaning the can is just a little bigger than the standard US 12oz bag of coffee. We buy coffee in bags from the supermarket, and then transfer it to the can.
Not rocket science!
So I bought a replacement bag of coffee yesterday and loaded it into the can this morning and...
...what the hell?
The can was very obviously not "nearly full" as it typically is, on a refill. So, I fished the bag back out of the garbage and discovered that our usual brand of coffee now comes in ten ounce bags, rather than twelve ounce bags.
It was a very openly visible example of shrinkflation in action.
I suppose I should have guessed something was afoot, because this particular (fairly economical) brand of coffee started disappearing off the supermarket shelves a few months ago, and was replaced with a very swanky and expensive "craft" brand.
I thought it just had been plain discontinued.
But then it reappeared a few weeks ago, in completely redesigned packaging. I was happy to see it *(we like the coffee!), because I'm just not into paying about US $15 for a 12oz (300g) bag of upscale coffee... but I had been blind to the fact that the redesign was partially to shrink the bag size.
To add a bit if insult to injury, the base price also seems to have been "rounded up" by about a dollar a bag.
Of course, this is not the first time I have witnessed shrinkflation, up close and personal. But each time I do see it, I am left with the same question playing in my mind:
"Is this REALLY a reflection of the price of getting coffee into people's hands actually increasing, or a reflection of some corporate gooks somewhere having to satify their private equity investors' need to have an ever-increasing rate of return for shareholders?"
While I can understand — and appreciate, even — something like coffee going up because there was a failed harvest, or a massive hike in transportation costs, I struggle with being the en recipient of some investor group somewhere insisting that "We need to maintain a 15% growth in ROI every year."
That has nothing to do with coffee.
It all ends up stinking more and more of the reality that fewer and fewer things in our world are products and more and more are becoming commodities. The end thing that is being "supplied" is not actually food, but profit.
Welcome to the commodification of everything!
While we might be somewhat alone in our approach, we made the decision to simply drink weaker coffee. That is to say, where a 12-ounce bag used to make 24 cups of coffee, now a 10-ounce bag will make 24 cups of coffee. Vote with your own dollars!
Shame it has come to that...
Thanks for coming to visit, and do leave a comment if you feel so inclined! Engagement matters!
