Smaller Size, Costs More, Consumer is Screwed Again!

Has anyone noticed what's happening to many of your favorite products in the grocery store? Right before your eyes, it seems, they're shrinking!

You think you're getting a great price on ice cream in those "half gallon" cartons? Think again! Many ice cream brands went from 2 quarts or one-half gallon to 1.75 quarts and many of us didn't really notice. But now, the size has dwindled to 1.5 quarts. Yes, you're losing 25% of the ice cream you used to get to feed your family, and the stores make it seem like it's a bargain when they put it on "sale"! It's not a bargain, friends, it's just the real price you should be paying for the product if you weren't getting screwed on content and sizing!

Same with orange juice, I purchased a carton of Tropicana Trop 50 less sugar juice and found the container to contain not 64 ounces as you would expect, but 59 ounces, although at first glance the container appears similar to a standard 64 ounce half-gallon juice Pure-Pak carton. Hmm, sleight of hand here in this fast switcheroo I guess. Even the Tropicana three-quart jug has shrunk to just 89 ounces, but executives say your juice is replaced by a snap cap and new jug style. I've found that hard to swallow, literally and figuratively. Besides, plastic is as hard to digest as is the marketing ploys of these companies.

Simply Orange, that used to come in a half-gallon size container is now also 59 ounces. No notice of the smaller size here either! Florida's Natural is still found in 64 ounce half-gallon cartons but the jugs are 89 ounces and not 96 ounces anymore. Yet Minute Maid, if purchased in the bottle is 59 ounces and in the carton is 64 ounces. Yet in most stores, the bottle costs more! Hmm, less product and more plastic for the landfill or recycle bin. Nice!

Cereal boxes contain less cereal, although some boxes remain large to give you the illusion of getting more cereal than is in the box. One ploy is for the manufacturer to say thgey're going "green" and decreasing their packaging material, but not telling you that your paid-for content also went out the window as well. Shrinkage works in mysterious ways, doesn't it? Some packages of other products have decreased in size, and the manufacturers say it's to keep from increasing the price to the consumer. Bulls**t! To put it bluntly. Seems they don't tell the supermarket that!

When fuel prices went up sky-high, the manufacturers and producers used that as an excuse to raise prices. Some of that was understandable, but now that fuel prices are about two dollars a gallon less than they were a year ago, the prices haven't dropped much, if at all. What's the excuse now? Are we paying for an all-new fleet of more fuel-efficient trucks and have to do it in one year? Isn't that part of the cost of doing business? Some bought fuel on open markets and got caught when prices went down and now we're paying for the tens of thousands of gallons of fuel they paid four-fifty to five dollars a gallon for and can't back out of deals.

I'd suggest consumers boycott companies who are ripping you off on their products. Do not purchase juices and ice cream, cereal and pizza and other products where the weight or volume had been decreased without a commensurate decrease in daily pricing! Not a single sale price, but daily overall pricing. And write the companies on their web site and ell them you won't but. Flood them with phone calls at their 800 numbers.

Don't you feel screwed enough by the government, without getting it from the manufacturers, retailers and corporate America too? Then do something about it!

Damn, America, you only have so many orifices!

Where the blame resides....

Okay, time to stand back and be realistic about who's to blame for the deep trouble we're in right now. We can blame the jerks in Washington all we want, and believe me, they deserve all the blame we want to heap on them, because having them, and their counterparts in state legislatures guarding your finances, is like having the proverbial fox guard the hen house.

My take, for what it's worth, Corporate America, is that you screwed yourselves, and every American right along with you. The BIG difference is that we didn't have fat nest eggs to hide away money, golden parachutes and the ability to rip off money while the peons suffered. We have to live with your greed and miserable manufacturing practices.

You failed to build decent cars in our own country and forced Americans to look elsewhere for reliable automobiles. Thus the influx of Toyota, Datsun (now Nissan) and dozens of foreign makers. They made cars that lasted and could be bought at affordable prices, all the while you kept putting forth junk, and telling us it was un-American to buy foreign. Hell, it was un-American to keep making the crap you were making but nobody could tell you that or show you where you were heading! Even the first bankruptcy didn't open any doors in the brains of Chrysler, did it? You allowed the unions to run the show, and their labor costs priced what you offered outside the norm of affordability, while still shoving junk out the factory door. More fodder for the foreign car makers cannons.

Then you moved more manufacturing offshore and outside the country to become "competitive" with the crap we were receiving from China and third world countries. You established what you called "maquiladoras" or sister plants across the Mexican border to manufacture refrigerators, other major appliances and televisions and warehoused them in the US, putting foreigners to work for pennies on the dollar while laying off Americans. That's how you dealt with foreign competition rather than becoming united and making the god damned government close the doors to all the foreign crap! Current information is there are over 3000 of these maquiladoras along the US/Mexico border.

Then the corporate brains outsource their information and technology to India, the Philippines and to wherever they can get it cheap and fast. It's like fast food, cheap but usually not good. There's a menu and if it isn't on the board the worker reads from, it doesn't exist. Read my first blog about some of the problems with offshore call centers.

Warning about your personal information... It must make you, fellow Americans, really feel warm and fuzzy, knowing that your Social Security and other personal information is floating all around the world, because your bank and credit card issuer is too damned cheap to have a US call center, and not offshore source any of its customer service! Charge you 20 percent or higher interest on your credit card but use cheap labor to answer your questions...or wait.,.try to answer them from their script boards that they can only use. What's that you say...you need something else? Too bad. They might not help at all.

My suggestion is when you call for assistance...DO NOT PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH! PRESS the Key for Spanish...then insist on someone who speaks English! You'll get a US based person because they don't have Spanish speaking workers in the offshore call centers!

Folks, banks overcharged the public with high rates and shoved it in their pockets. They don't give you back much in interest. They charged you for everything they could, bank higher-ups made a bundle and bonuses and even when banks failed, they kept their jobs in many cases. Want to see the pinnacle of incompetency in my opinion...Washington Mutual Bank. Yet after the fall, the same people still running around just like it was yesterday. Now it's Chase who will take the dump with their new family members with them! Step into any San Diego County Credit Union and look at all the huge plasma TV's on the walls. They don't need them to hawk their services..it's pissing the members money away. Nor do they need to sponsor ball games and other events. They need to put the money they make back in the members accounts. But that isn't happening there or anywhere else. Yes, they're probably better than most, but still throw away lots of your money.

Bail out insurance companies? Come on! They've been screwing the consumer for eons and they want to be bailed out. Then the government helps out AIG, who continues to insist they are not really an insurance company anyway, and they screw everyone by holding a huge taxpayer-paid party? And the big-wigs still get their bonuses. Only in America, folks. If this was Russia or another country, we'd have dead bodies piling up in the streets outside those greedy bastard buildings as they were quickly brought to justice. Not that I advocate that type justice, but the kind we have here is like hot air from a broken men's room hand dryer...useless. In the good ol' USA only the worker and taxpayers will suffer.

As a final thought...remember that L.L. Bean shirt? Even that no longer says "Made in America anymore. My last one says "Made in Bulgaria" EWWWWWWWWWW!