Bringing awareness to issues (even through memes) is a good way to get people who are capable of fighting in on the fight.
What also tends to happen though is that when an issue gets popular, some people jump on the bandwagon for the dopamine hit that comes from the attention they get when they make content about the issue. Hell, even when they don’t make it. I’ve seen stickied comments on clips of popular music videos (just one ridiculous example) posted by fans where they’re saying shit like, “Oh my god guys! Thank you so much for all the likes and comments! I didn’t expect this to be so big!” Ummm, it’s a Beatles clip my guy. You didn’t do anything but reupload a bit of it in short form. You out here acting like you just a member of the band caught off guard by how many people like you.
I always have to be a dick and ask, “Oh, you made this?”
1/3 will do nothing but sit and watch while the other 1/3 kills the remaining 1/3 and that do-nothing-1/3 will call you a tankie and fight you if you try to do anything.
The real reason the 2A exists and continues as-is: it lets those elites in control rile up the stupid masses (that they keep that way) to literally murder the people trying to fix how fucked up shit has become
that may have been the intention but it’s now weaker and more ineffectual than using an umbrella instead of a parachute; times have changed and provisions from literally hundreds of years ago do nothing
I agree, but it’s also worth noting the influence of police forces, riot police, swat teams, and the national guard.
The US basically has an occupying army to quell unrest in every county across the country, so it’s harder to properly protest without state retaliation. Not to say we shouldn’t do it, but I can understand people’s reticence.
Oh so I’m guessing it did come out he was doing it for Trump? Because the one who did it in protest of the our support of Israel was looked at as a kind of a hero here.
The reporting I’ve seen was that he had been hanging around the courthouse for a few days and was obviously mentally unwell but he essentially thinks Biden and Trump are working together to establish a fascist state and it all heavily involves Peter Thiel. I didn’t read it but someone made a word cloud of his pamphlet and it was all over the place and even involved conspiracy theories of yore that have been supplanted by QAnon and vaccine stuff.
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.
I was wrong in one thing, it hasn’t been a thing for 10 years, but for 20. It was determined by the Minister of Justice, based on article 55 of the Consumer Protection Code. More here. I remember seeing some warnings on labels back when the rule was new. My opinion is that companies got smarter and realized that those warnings were damaging to their brands, so they just stopped with the practice of shrinking products, which is why you never noticed.
Será que é por isso que sempre tem aqueles avisos de “nova embalagem”? Ou talvez fique escrito nas letrinhas pequenas atrás? Nunca percebi algo assim, mas muito legal saber que essa lei existe!
edit: se pesquisar por “reduflação” no google imagens, aparecem vários exemplos disso. Estou impressionado que eu nunca via algo assim…
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…
But then you get shrinkflation in the product itself. Less emulsifiers in the soap, drinks with corn syrup replacing sugar, and powders like cinnamon cut with lead powder.
Not saying it couldn’t be done, just that businesses are really incentivised to find the loopholes and exploit them.
They already do that. So no downsides for this proposal. There was some article some years ago about how the taste of things like cookies changed because they went for cheaper recipe.
In Australia we call this “skimpflation” because they aren’t shrinking the final product, they’re skimping on ingredients to lower production costs.
It’s the bane of my existence because brands I know and love will change their ingredients without warning and without changing anything on the packaging (sometimes not even changing the ingredients list! If the ingredients list has always just said “starch” they don’t have to change anything going from arrowroot starch to cheaper potato starch)
I have allergies and I’ve bought two boxes of the same product at the same time, and had an allergic reaction to one, but not the other.
I used to always blame it on my housemates not washing the cooking utensils properly, but I now use separate cooking equipment and I clean down the kitchen before I start and cook at odd times so I’m the only one using the kitchen.
I’ve started emailing companies after my allergic reactions to determine if they have changed an ingredient, and 90% of the time they confirm they have changed the ingredients. Usually they put some PR spin on it about the new ingredient being more allergy friendly or sustainable (they don’t clarify “environmentally” so I assume they mean “financially sustainable for the profits of our company”)
Less emulsifiers in the soap, drinks with corn syrup replacing sugar, and powders like cinnamon cut with lead powder.
Standard formulas for a given product. Anything that isn’t 40% sugar drink is “immitation soda drink”. Anything that’s under-emulsified can’t be called real soap.
These are solvable problems at a regulatory level. But at some point, it may be more cost efficient to simply nationalize the under-performing industry. Perhaps Coca-Cola just can’t cut it making soda drinks anymore, and the firm needs to be broken up and devolved to the various states as State Soda Bottling Company
I don’t think this is the ideal situation. The way food prices are advertised needs to be standardized: € / kg or $ / freedom unit. + size + unit price. I think it’s already the law in EU, but supermarkets try to hide the per kg price in a tiny almost unreadable printsize.
They’re not setting standard size scales for basic products or establishing price floors based on wholesale/production costs, much less intervening to increase supply or reduce overhead costs.
This is a bit like the surgeon generals warning on a pack of cigarettes. Nice, I guess. But hardly a game changer.
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 would think that would be covered by the corresponding price cut part. If they are smart they put in a clause that says the price cut has to be proportional or bigger otherwise it is considered shrinkflation.
And each brand has a different tear-off square size. Some have ‘jumbo size’ and also ‘pick-a-size’ where its smaller rectangles tear offs instead of squares. How do you compare? You dont and its by design
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. foodandpower.net/…/ftc-supply-chain-disruption-gr…
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!
or cut the size but keep the price the same, then release a new “jumbo size” that’s as big as the previous size (with the new and improved higher unit price), then discontinue the “standard” size.
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