I wish we had a small percent of what France does for its consumer rights in the United States.

This has been the law in Brazil for more than 10 years now. We have lots of problems here, but at least our consumer protection laws are top notch. And, believe or not, they’re enforced successfully.

Really we just need to standardize sizes for consumer goods. For example: drinks can come in 250, 500, 750, 1000, and 2000 mL sizes. Sold soap must be sold in units of 100, 500, or 1000 grams. And so on…

We used to have standardized package sizes in the EU for things like butter, chocolate, etc. So stupid to give that up

That is what a respectable government looks like

Here’s my attempt at copying the article for readers:

To Fight ‘Shrinkflation,’ France Will Force Retailers to Warn Shoppers

• Merchants will be required to put signs in front of all products that have been reduced in size without a corresponding price cut.

For months, the shelves of Carrefour, France’s biggest supermarket chain, have been dotted with bright orange signs placed in front of Pepsi bottles, Lays potato chips and a variety of other foods whose packages are suspiciously smaller than they used to be.

“Shrinkflation,” the signs say. “This product has seen its volume decrease and the price charged by our supplier increase.”

On Friday, the French government took steps to require every food retailer in the country to follow suit. By July 1, stores will have to plaster warnings in front of all products that have been reduced in size without a corresponding price cut, in a bid to combat the consumer scourge known as shrinkflation.

“The practice of shrinkflation is a scam,” Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, said in a statement. “We are putting an end to it.”

The government is also encouraging shoppers to act as informers, urging those “who have doubts about the price per unit of measurement displayed on the shelves” to flag it to the authorities via France’s consumer reporting app.

The fight against the practice of downsizing products without also downsizing their prices has picked up in the United States, where President Biden has shamed food companies for raising prices even as inflation cooled.

Shrinkflation has become a point of outrage for shoppers in France, and a political issue for President Emmanuel Macron as consumers continue to grapple with a cost-of-living crisis. Although inflation has recently come down in Europe from the record highs of a year ago, the prices of many food products remain elevated.

Inflation in the eurozone fell to a new two-year low in March, the result of an aggressive campaign of interest rate increases by the European Central Bank. European governments had also worked to ease prices for energy and food, through subsidies for electric bills and by negotiating with food manufacturers to force prices down.

In France, inflation has fallen now more than a third from a year earlier, but higher food prices have been persistent. A typical basket of food basics that includes items such as pasta and yogurt is 3 to 5 percent higher than it was a year ago, after a 16 percent surge for 2023.

Mr. Macron had promised to wrestle food costs down further this year. The government moved up annual price negotiations between suppliers and retailers in February, and put pressure on companies to limit increases.

The shrinkflation campaign is the latest weapon. Stores will have to display signs for two months after downsized products have been put on their shelves, according to the government decree issued Friday. The signs will appear near a variety of goods made by food companies, as well as for the supermarket’s private-label brands, from snacks and soda to bags of rice and laundry detergent. Prepackaged foods, like shrink-wrapped deli cold cuts or foods sold in bulk, will be exempt.

Many global consumer goods companies have raised prices by double-digit percentages in the past year, attributing the increases to higher costs of ingredients and labor. Even so, many of those companies have reported expanding profits as they sell fewer items at higher prices.

The issue came to a head in France last year when Carrefour announced that it would no longer sell PepsiCo products because the prices were “unacceptably” high for consumers, escalating a showdown by French retailers to name and shame brands that were not reducing prices as inflation eases.

As part of its campaign, Carrefour also put up shrinkflation posters next to products like Lipton tea warning shoppers that they were paying a higher price for a product whose volume had shrunk.

France has submitted a proposal to the European Union that would force food retailers throughout Europe to carry out a shrinkflation labeling campaign.

I think the unit price should be more prominent than the price per item.

At this point I just stopped buying chips. Feels like such a waste to fill the bag less than half way…

Greed is now baked into capitalism. Morals and ethics be damned, squeeze and squeeze and see what the market and consumer will bear. So what if much of the population is struggling economically, and more have been thrown into outright poverty. And that record number of people are homeless and sleeping rough.

Consolidation and deregulation always benefits the few over the many, all the while claiming it will be beneficial to consumers. I’m always amused by the religious folks who defend free market greed as though God is a cruel, exploitive being who’s big on dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Margin expansion under the guise/cover of inflation should be criminal.

What I would love to see one day is the margin pocketed for every product sold on display next to the price tag.

Retailers could have chosen to eat these higher costs and weather lower profit margins, but instead, the FTC found that on aggregate retailers passed all higher costs onto consumers and raised prices even more to increase their profit margins, too. This finding isn’t totally new, several economists and researchers (including me) pointed out this trend at the time. https://www.foodandpower.net/latest/ftc-supply-chain-disruption-grocery-food-processing-report-apr-24

I was thinking about this the other day when I noticed my deodorant was 2.7fl oz instead of the usual 3. The stores are complicit. They know every time something shrinks because they have to print new tags. Even if it’s the old price, the unit price has changed, and I believe the barcode is different.

No warnings. No heads up. Just silent acceptance. Sure, if they posted a warning I wouldn’t buy that product but dammit I need deodorant!

Look up the lyrics to “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” for instructions on how to deal with this kind of theft.

So, they cut the price and cut the size followed by a price raise 6 months later?

This seems like a great idea and i wouldn’t mind it getting expanded to become an EU wide norm.

That said it only adresses part of the problem. Another way consumers get tricked are recipe changes to substitute expensive ingredients for cheaper ones. And this one also subverts the mandatory kg/€ (or litre/€) price notices, which in a way already help with identifying shrinkflation. Although prominent warnings would help a lot fighting the psychological tricks involved in shrinkflation.

Personally i would also like laws to go even further and make it mandatory for companies to maintain public databases with product sizing and ingredients. Although i assume it wouldn’t be easy to fight against companies trying to subvert such system and claiming that near identical products are something new rather than just a new worse version of something existing.

On that note i also miss the more standardized portion sizes we had here in Germany for a lot of products. Actually something that sadly had to be abolished due to eu regulations, which at the same time at least seemed to have given us the already mentioned kg/€ price labels.

I had to jog my memory with this article (in german) from 2009 when the change apparently happened. An example it gives is that e.g. sugar (up to a size of 1kg) could only be sold in portions of 100, 250, 500, 750 und 1000g. So no trickery with random inbetween sizes. Obviously not a huge problem with something like sugar, but it similarly also applied to something like chocolate bars. Which nowadays come in the most random, constantly changing weights.

Maybe a bit heavy handed, but i wouldn’t mind fighting shrinkflation in some areas by simply forcing standardized sizes.

I don’t think this is the right way to go. Mandatory “compare prices” to be displayed with the same, or better, viability as the price is much better. That way the consumer immediately sees that the price went up since last week. What it also brings is the opportunity to compare which one of two sizes of the same product is a better deal.

New fun size!