Standardized sizes, weights and where possible packages. Regulate the living shit out of them
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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A fuck ton of products could be shipped in reusable/recyclable glass container but no govt will ever force it. All condiments, dressings, jams, pickles etc. could fit in a dozen standard sized container that could be returned for a deposit (like beer bottles) and then reused by manufactures.
Yeah I've often wondered about stuff like bringing back "the milkman" and other such things. People could put out their old glassware for cleaning/re-use and have fresh product delivered in a new container. Stores are already back to doing home delivery for groceries.
It'd also bring back a whole genre of bad jokes about parentage.
Up until the bridge was built PEI had reusable glass bottles for pop, it saved the cost of shipping trash back to the mainland by boat. So it is very much doable in modern Canada. If rolled out nation wide it could be sold as a system to other countries. Because you'll never get it done here unless there is some ROI other than 'we dont all die in a mountain of plastic.'
Mandate the Mason/Bernardin form factors. Plenty of sizes, swappable lids, and afaik an open standard. /nod
That said, aluminum is super cheap to recycle and very light. I think that might be as good if not better. Crank up the deposit on the cans.
I like aluminum cans as well but I think it is more energy intense to melt them down and re-manufacture them compared to cleaning and refilling glass. It also has to be used to store products that are under pressure, most of a beer can's strength comes from the pressure inside!
Yeah, though aluminum also has the advantage of being orders of magnitude lighter, so you save a lot on fuel for shipping at every stage of the process. Plus a glass bottle can only be used as a bottle: recycled aluminum is more flexible.
So it could easily tilt in favour of aluminum I think. BUt you're right that it's not clear-cut.
There used to be a glass plant near the town where I grew up.
The bottles don't just get washed and refilled. They're melted down and recast, just like aluminum. But the process is much less energy intensive.
Aluminum oxide (the natural form of aluminum as it reacts with the atmosphere) just so happens to have an extremely high melting point. Aluminum smelters must use all three of pressure, heat, and electrolysis to get the oxygen to burn off and liquefy the aluminum. Glass and even steel need only heat. I don't know what the final environmental impact is, but the energy input at the point of smelting is much higher for aluminum.
I guarantee that corporations would simply start adding more cheap fillers to food if they were forced to comply with standardized size/weight requirements.
You'd get saline solution being injected into moisture rich foods, to increase their perceived weight, you'd have dry foods combined with super cheap fillers to give them more weight (but less actual food), etc.
Consumers are always the loser.
They already do that. Regulate that too.
You kind of already have that. I'm pretty sure that the mass of anything in the grocery store includes the maximum amount of allowed cheap mass.
Standardised packaging sizes would just reduce wastage from inconvenient package sizes and streamline packaging operations. Remember the giant plastic clamshell packaging of 10-15 years ago? Takes up more space on the shelves, can make a small product noticable, and was annoying as hell and wasteful too.
But bosses don't worry... officially we'll make sure to keep inflation numbers low so you don't feel pressured to give a reasonable cost of living increase. Let's keep those wages low!
Oh landlords, you guys can feel free to bump up your rents too... we don't want you to have to get a real job.
The only inflation they're concerned about is wage inflation, this has been proven multiple times and is even the official stance of central banks. Wage inflation cuts into corporate profits, which hurts "the economy". Why do you think the main indicator they watch is the unemployment rate?
They just don't usually say it out loud, and people aren't listening anyways. But the cat is out of the bag now with people spreading the word to the working class. Fucking us over is the goal, not a side effect.
It is also why there is so much attention paid to the stock market as an indicator when it is just rich people gambling that got more people to invest in it for retirement by playing coin clots.
"The economy" never represents the median person, or even the lower 3/4 of the population.
I'm one of the people that change prices in a grocery store. "Shrink-flation" has been horrible this year. Prices change very slightly or not at all while case quantities or package weights have been dropping.
I hate it because aside from me telling them constantly, it's changes that are almost invisible to management. If prices were just constantly going up, I'd have more of a leg to stand on with asking to reduce margins or going aggressive on sale pricing.
I like what that one grocer did in the article, calling it out for the customer. If we did it, though, the store would be littered with those signs, and customers would just go to another store that didn't use them.
I’ve started to pay more attention to Costco’s “price per unit” entries on those tags, I just wish that other stores that have lots of comparable items side-by-side would do it.
Making price per unit mandatory on all retail items sold would go a long way toward making shrinkflation transparent for the customer
Metro shows the price per 100g in the tiniest most illegible font. It's specially hard to read on their new e-ink price tags.
There's one store (I think it's Walmart but I'm not 100% sure) that will put the price per unit on everything, but in one product category you might have price/100g, price per individual item (1 cookie), price per sub-packaging (sleeve of crackers in a box), or it'll count the entire product as 1 of 1 units.
I wish wages would go up as quickly as prices lol
Drives me nuts because my pantry shelf can't fit the tall boxes. I like the stubby fat cereal boxes.
I also hated it when Cracker Barrel made their cheese extra tall and thin when they did their last round of Shrinkflation. Who wants tiny, thin slices of cheese? You need to make more slices for a sandwich, they don't fit any crackers, and the package makes it harder to see everything in the cheese drawer.
Plus, doesn't everyone compare cheese prices by weight anyway? It's always something different on sale every week, so I'm always looking at the price/weight and I buy something different half the time I go shopping. But maybe that's just me? idk
Last time I went to the grocery store, it was $9 for a "family size" 22oz box of Raisen Bran Crunch.
The family size of pancake mix was cut from 10 lb to 5 lb. Pisses me off.
I was bitching a month ago about $5 sandwich sliced pickles that used to be $2.50 but last week they were raised to $9.50.
Look, 15 years ago I was homeless sleeping in my car. I was laid off 13 months ago but recently started a new job. Household income $150k. I have no idea how the average home income folks can possibly survive. I don't shop at fancy places and the necessities are making it hard on my family.
Gross. I've been making my own pickles, pretty easy to do, and you can pickle any random vegetable, really. Whatever's cheapest. Might be worth looking into, it's super fast and you can do it in any plastic bucket. Even cheaper if you do lactoferment.
As always it's a time:money tradeoff tho. But this one takes like 5 minutes with a mandolin and a bucket. I cut up the bucket lid and weight it down with a couple food cans to keep the veggies under the pickling liquid.
Know what else would stop rising costs? Shareholder and executive staff pay cuts and pay freezes.
But but... the super yatch market would collapse! That would be economic disaster.
Won't anyone think of The Shareholders!? We here at Shaft You Inc are obligated to provide double digit annual returns to our shareholders,
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And by simply reducing the size of their products, people maybe feel like they're being tricked a little bit," said Sylvie De Bellefeuille, a lawyer with the consumer advocacy group Option Consommateurs.
When CBC News met with Chauhan, he was making a TikTok video about Ben and Jerry's ice cream, which recently shrunk by 5.4 per cent to 473 millilitres.
Instead of waiting for legislation, major French grocer Carrefour has started posting signs in stores, exposing downsized products.
Justin Simard, a spokesperson for Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, told CBC News in an email that Ottawa has identified shrinkflation as a practice that hurts consumers.
Although many grocery items are tax-exempt, shoppers must pay tax on snack foods such as muffins, pastries, cereal bars and cookies in packages of less than six and containers of ice cream under 500 millilitres.
Chauhan discovered this when he purchased two tubs of Ben and Jerry's to make his TikTok video, and was charged 13 per cent harmonized sales tax.
The original article contains 946 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"And by simply reducing the size of their products, people maybe feel like they’re being tricked a little bit"
No, we feel scammed. Getting less and paying more. That's a SCAM, not a trick.
Good bot