Money & The Economy

Shoppers Change Buying Habits in Response to Shrinking Package Sizes, Higher Prices

NEW YORK, July 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Pay more, get less. This is the scenario that’s increasingly playing out at grocery stores across the country — and a majority of food shoppers are taking note according to Deloitte’s new “2011 Consumer Food and Product Insight Survey.”

Nearly 9 in 10 survey respondents (87.7 percent)believe prices in food stores are escalating and almost three-quarters (74 percent) say the size of some packaged goods is smaller. Consequently, savvy consumers are purchasing more private-label and store brand products. More than three-quarters of respondents (75.3 percent) purchased lower-priced products and nearly 2 in 5 respondents (39.6 percent) added more private label products to their grocery bags.

High gas prices are also having an impact on shopping behaviors. Nearly 3 in 4 respondents (72.7 percent) are making fewer trips to the grocery store to save money and more than two-fifths (40.8 percent) are purchasing fewer items overall.

“Higher prices, smaller package sizes and pain at the pump are driving consumers to buy lower-priced grocery items,” said Pat Conroy, vice-chairman, Deloitte LLP and the U.S. consumer products practice leader. “That’s why now more than ever it is important for consumer products companies to strengthen their customer relationships and distinguish value ahead of the competition.”

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Rich Mitchell

Rich Mitchell is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Daily News and the president of Bald Eagle Media, LLC. His posts may contain opinions that are his own and are not necessarily shared by Bald Eagle Media, CDN, staff or .. much of anyone else. Find him on twitter, facebook and

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One Comment

  1. It takes alot for American’s to change their buying habits. One sure way it to tax their means of transportation. Liberals want to put us all in “green energy cars” that will replace the cars we’re driving now. Really? Really? No, they won’t. And it’s because everyone alive in the US has never known a time when a gasoline powered car was not the way to get to where you wanted to go, escape from the cops, set records, win trophies, accomplish things with cars that have never been done before, like power a whole house by driving generators and other machines, similar to how we powered shops full of machines at the turn of the last century with water wheels. The only thing that has to be done is to keep gasoline in the gas tank and you have all the power you would need.

    But now, the liberals have found that with Obama in office all they have to do is keep the wells from pumping our own oil and the supply has to come from other sources around the world, instead of right here in our own country. So by just not letting our oil companies from being able to pump oil that they are ready to pump, we have to pay $3.65 a gallon for gas. That alone is enough for American’s to have to modify their buying habits. But liberals are finding out that by doing that has catastrophic political consequences they didn’t count on. What they were counting on was American’s just accepting that gasoline was going to cost twice as much as it is supposed to cost here in our country, but keep on shopping like nothing was happening. WRONG! Liberals are so stupid that they thought that they had a grip on our brains and they could make us do whatever they wanted us to do. But that is not reality. Of course liberals don’t live in reality. They live in a fantasy world that will never exist but for this time while they are in office. Once they are gone, or have no power then things in this country will return to normal. And what I mean by normal is gas costing around $1.60 a gallon. I’d like to see it go down to about $1.25 a gallon. And the reason why that high and not what I have experienced in my life of gas costing about $.23 a gallon is it has to make a profit that will sustain the industry. At a $1.00 a gallon that would mean every car or truck that puts gas in, however much would be how much the industry would take in that day. And how many cars and trucks are there that get gas a day in America? And how many new drivers hit the streets every year?

    Another thing liberals don’t concider is how many industries, i.e., jobs, are connected to each other and oil and gas production. When gas goes down, more jobs are created. When the price of oil goes up more jobs are lost because when gas is more costly it has a direct affect on how much we have to modify our lifestyles to compensate on for the loss of money we would normally be using to provide the things we rely on to keep us alive like food! Also, for health reason’s that are directly connected to the availability of energy, is being able to keep the A/C on during Summer’s like the one we’re having to go through now. And energy to keep the heat on during the winter, that I’m sure the people up North last year were damn glad was readily available and at a cheap price.

    Liberals don’t realize how real life functions for the general population. They think everything works like they think it does. That ‘s because they’re stupid. But they will go through another rude awakening next November when we throw out the rest of the Democrats out of office, and the RINO’s so that we can take over the Republican Party and transform it into the Party that it is supposed to be and that is a Party that holds to the laws laid down in the Constitution that ran this country for the better part of just under two hundred years. But unfortunately at that time America was invaded by the Communists who began their destructive plans to bring down this nation. And they are the ones who have driven up that costs on everything so as to put as much pressure on the economy as can be brought to bear. And that is to cause it to collapse. They really don’t care about what American’s buy, how they have to modify their buying habits because of the high cost of transportation so they can get to where they need to go. Jobs are lost when Communists and liberals which are just a branch of Communism, pass laws that take money from the people of America so that we can buy the things we want which makes jobs come about. When we don’t have money because of artificial high costs of something liberals are putting pressure on, the whole economy suffers.

  2. To directly respond to the topic of this story, I have seen this alot. And what is happening is just good business practice, except not to save the company money by cutting production costs like most business do in order to give the customers products at a lower cost, or at the very least to keep prices from going up. I had a small business and I did that in order to keep my prices from going up when shipping costs went up for me. I was using UPS to ship my product, but they decided to raise their prices about ten percent. Well, that was going to raise my shipping price to the customer. American businesses have a real bad habit and that is they pass on to the customer every dime that it takes to not only run the company but the very cost of the company existing is passed onto the customer. That is not the way business is supposed to be done if you are going by economics 101. What you are supposed to do is charge the customer for the price of the product plus shipping and handling. In modern times, people use credit cards to pay for things, so there is a tiny addition to the price of what you are buying for processing the credit card charge. Since it is how you are paying for what you are buying it is okay to charge that back to the customer but usually it is a very small charge. The business is charged for the bank that is carrying that person’s card, to process the person’s charge using the card to pay for things. It is usually about half of one percent of the cost to process the charge for the bank to use electricity to run the computer to type in the numbers and letters for whatever it is that you are buying. Silly isn’t it, but that’s the way it is. That is what happens when you go to the drivers license place to get your driver’s license renewed. That money they charge you for is to pay the person to walk over to the printer to get that little card, your drivers license. That is silly to, but that ‘s the way it is.

    Anyway, that is what you should have to pay for what you buy. But American businesses found out that there was no law stopping them from charging you for everything that costs the business to do business. So they charge you for every single thing that a business spends money on to sell you what you are buying from them. I won’t go into what all little charges these businesses charge you for these days because the list is endless. And it’s all these tiny little charges that add up by the time they figure what you are going to pay for, like a pair of shoes. Now remember, these companies get to write off every bit of what they are charging you for to buy that pair of shoes, and they are going to get that back from our government at the end of the year as a tax write off. So they really don’t have to charge you for any of that, like what it costs to run the company. All you want it that pair of shoes, not take out an investment in the company. But that’s what they are actually charging you, and that is what a person would put money into and that is the existance of that company. It takes alot of money to have a successful company these days, and investments from outside sources is much appreciated by small companies to use to offset costs of doing business. Instead, companies just put those costs onto the price of that pair of shoes so you end up paying for running the company, not the company getting out and druming up investors, or being able to borrow money, or doing it the right way and that is to take money from the profits they make from selling products. But, see, they don’t want to take any money from their profits. They want you to pay for the company so they can not only make money from you paying for everything it takes to run the company, get the tax write offs at the end of the year, and make the legal profit from selling that pair of shoes to you. That’s why companies are making so much more money off of selling shoes these days than you would think they should be. And you would be right. They shouldn’t be making that much money. But what they hope you don’t find out is how they make all that money they shouldn’t be making. It’s artificial profits that are keeping the stock market artificially high.

    If you were to pass a law making it against the law to charge customers for the existance of the company instead of just what customer’s are buying, the stock market would have a heart attack and these investment corporations wouldn”t have all this money to do all the bad investments that are causing our economy to fall down everytime some stupid liberal in the Obama administration says that the banks are making to much money and they are going to take that money away. If things were like they are supposed to be, none of that would matter because companies would be making money to stay in business off of sales, not artificial profits from fraudulant charges for what little products they actually are selling.

  3. And some of the products we are buying is these companies found out that if they make the cardboard thinner, or the drinking cup at McDonald’s is just a bit shorter, almost unnoticable, and thinner, or a coke can thinner they can take all that extra material and make an extra cardboard packaging, drinking cup, or coke can. That way they can keep up with demand by squeezing material from the packaging and coming up with extra material from existing packaging material to make the products. Another way of bilking the public is to all of a sudden shrink the size of the package and call it “Improved”, or “New”, or “Economic size, thus saving the world from not having to chop down an extra tree to make more packages”. And a box that was 16 oz. is now 12.5 oz, but the price didn’t change. For some reason it’s a slant on the Orwell’s 1984 “double think” where you think you are getting more at the same price. They will even make the box shape differently so you think you are getting something new, but at the same price as before. But you’re being ripped off. Like it was before is what they want you to think, and you’re not paying any more for it. It is supposed to give the customer that they are getting something for nothing, because the price didn’t go up.

    So when you go to the grocery store try to remember what the package used to look like, or how big it used to be, or how much you were paying for it. What they are hoping for is you won’t remember those things and instead will just blow it off and accept what you are getting. What else can you do, demand the extra three ounces you aren’t getting now, but are having to pay the same price for less product? That won’t be happening.

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