A staple of Blue Bell’s marketing campaign is that they haven’t shrunk sizes like their competitors have.

On a related note, did anyone notice that when gas prices shot up dramatically, the speed with which gas is pumped into the car slowed down in order to make you feel like you were getting more for the much higher price?

My favorite example of this is when peanut butter makers put a huge dent in the bottom of the bottle. Standing side by side with a normal container you wouldn’t know that it is a different volume, because the visible dimensions are the same.

Chuck Norris is almost all powerful but even he cannot mess with the peanut butter, which impossibly manages to be more American than the Texas Ranger.

Breyers, my favorite ice cream, has done this. It just means we buy stuff like this les often, and usually only when Smith’s is having a good sale.

“a random John – yep, noticed that on mayo too – not sure why they dont just raise the price instead of playing stupid games.”

Because people are sensitive to higher prices, but are less sensitive to price per ounce.

From Moby Dick:

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without–within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS a penny more; and so on to the full glass–the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.

Thanks to the Federal Reserve, the prices of everything should be expected to double every eighteen years. So the real question is, is food more expensive in real terms compared to eighteen years ago, or isn’t it?

I was so disturbed by sticker shock that I had to adopt the rule that I divide the price by half, and see if that price is expensive compared to what I am used to. If not, I figure it must be a pretty good deal.

In 2030, I will have to divide by four. Twenty dollars for a gallon of ice cream? That’s a screamin’ deal!

14. Jota G – I agree. can only shrink a candy bar so far before it becomes useless.

15. John Mansfield – guess consumer goods companies have been doing this type of thing for hundreds of years…

16. Kew – buy the almost half a pound of cheese…

17. Mark D. hmmm, $20 for a half gallon of ice cream – that will be frightening… Of course in 2030, I will also be pretty old and likely not eating much ice cream then…

18. bbell – where IS it available?

Jota – that is odd. We have had some strange spammers like that the last few weeks. I will delete it…

Mark D,

When I began my mission in Brazil in 1993 inflation was rampant. This wasn’t something that we measured in terms of x% a year, because the number would be too big to use for the sort of everyday calculations that become normal under hyperinflation. Instead we thought in terms of half-lives. The half-life of your money, sitting in your pocket, was 30 days. So you spent it the instant you got it. Oddly even without a newspaper it was easy to have a rough estimate of the exchange rate on any given day. A 2-liter of Coke cost a dollar, and they were always prominently displayed at the entrance of the supermarket. Then you would hunt for items that hadn’t had their prices adjusted in the last week or so and thus were unusually inexpensive. Once we found a brand of rice hidden away in a corner of the store that went six weeks without the price changing. As soon as we got our allowance we bought all they had left.

Personally, my favorite Blue Bell flavors are Southern Blackberry Cobbler and Natural Vanilla Bean.

It’s got blueberries. And macadamia nuts.

Just check the number of sheets in your roll of toilet paper. That really chaps my hide…

21. Mark D. – a relative bargain…

23. queuno -ok I will look for it next time I am in the South

24. queuno – blackberry cobbler has blueberries in it?

27. KLC – I just noticed that this evening as well. I opened a package and they were all smaller…

28. Karl Kategianes – well that just stinks.

My mother, who fed a large family on a small budget, in a large Eastern city, trained us at a very young age to check the price per unit measure for all our grocery purchases. It drives my wife a little bit insane, and she has for the most part deferred grocery shopping responsibilities to me.

When our kids were little and we were really poor I used to ration everything. They ate well but things like store bought bread and sugared cereals were treats. I used to dream about going into a store and buying whatever I wanted.

I haven’t noticed what you’re describing. It’s different when you’re older. But food doesn’t taste as good. I can’t explain it.

I heard that Americans are killing trees dispoportionately to the rest of the world because of our good toilet paper. Good toilet paper takes a lot of trees. And I ask myself: toilet paper ? Or trees?

Hard decision but I can’t live without my (less sheets to the roll but unquestionably softer) Charmin. Let my grandchildren eat cake.

As an above poster stated, the average consumer is very price sensitive versus the size. Anotherwords you will lose a lot more customers if you raise the price and leave the size consistent versus doing it the opposite way. Your experience may differ, but you wouldn’t be average. Also margins in the food industry are very tight, so a quarter ounce change could mean millions to the bottom line, much like the almond example above.
On the plus side this can help the obesity crisis as consumers perceived serving size can be determined by the unit amount rather than the calorie content of the product :-)
And yes, I work for a very large global food company, so it affects my Mormonism.

Frankly I think Costco’s vanilla is pretty good stuff.

Hershey’s top product for over 50 years was the nickle bar, the size of which fluctuated greatly depending upon cocoa prices. In 1970, they gave up pricing a candy bar at $.05 entirely once it was approximately the size of an Andes Mint.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,939919,00.html

Ok maybe I don’t fit in here

This got especially bad last year as commodity costs were soaring. Now they’ve come down substantially, and demand is also down. Here’s evidence that should make you happy indicating the trend is reversing (at least for chips):

http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_12884725

Yeah, Harold, don’t call anybody a shitbag. We might tsk.

I’m taking a poll….whoever thinks I should interview Harold, raise your hand.

Harold, is your hand up?

My favorite ice cream is the Western Family brand. Bill keeps buying all these exotic stuff and I lose the ice cream part of it. But he puts steak sauce on his steak, too.

#47 – another victim of the Texas Blue Bell Hype.

Any ice cream that uses a vegetable gum (guar, carrageenan, carob bean) and/or high fructose corn syrup is automatically disqualified as “good” ice cream.

HFCS is in everything – even bread and apple sauce – that stuff is ubitquitous

#39 Resistence is futile – you will like it!!

Consumers are stuck with a hard choice. Either you want cheap food that can be stored relatively easily (modern processed foods), or you need to spend a lot more time on daily food shopping and preparation (also more expensive – especially when you figure in your man hours dedicated to the process).

A good source for this problem is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemna.

DKL (49),

Thank you for making my point.

On that note, while I won’t concede on the point that Blue Bell is ‘good’ ice cream, it would win my endorsement as a personal lubricant.

Anne. What do you mean interview? I will not make my identity public in this forum