No Meat, No Mercy Mondays

Yeah. Today you get a huge-ass graphic I laid down on my Paint.NET desktop, carved and stretched the heck out of, and grafted my sentiments onto just so we’re clear… Hehehe BUT WAIT! There’s MORE!
I’m also putting a few images into the body of the article that were provided to me by a source. Okay – on to the article:

Give ’em nothing, bleed ’em dry. This is the attitude reflected here. While raking in quite literally multiple billions per year, supermarkets dare to say that we should just go back to doing without so we can have more money for them to screw us over for in other ways.

For anyone that didn’t read the article, the supermarket is saying that the old custom of “no meat Mondays” should be adopted by all their customers to save their money. As I recall that may have been a war and post-war custom created to cope with shortages, not to cope with supermarkets seeking to milk us into poverty. (I also feel I should note that Mr Hoover himself seems not to have been too badly affected by those shortages…)

We should not accept this, we should be emailing our respective ministers and Justice departments and Consumer Protection and people like Leah. Daily. Twice daily if the message isn’t getting through. WE ARE SICK OF YOUR SHITTY GREED!

Oooh – an update not even twenty minutes after “finishing” and scheduling this – guess what? I was wrong. They make multiple TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars revenue.

And here’s another update again – after that above, and following my last supermarket article, I see that we’re still getting screwed, judging by world prices… It seems only New Zealanders are getting a worse deal than we are.

Our “Shrinkage” is “Shrinkflation.”:

It’s a bit of ultimate hypocrisy that supermarkets refer to their stock losses they incur from people who pinch things either by directly stealing them or else putting them through self-checkouts, as “shrinkage” when they use a tactic called “shrinkflation” against us. But first some of the duplicity they’ve always shown:

I have a memory of, some 20 years back, several supermarket chains calling on the government to provide a police presence in their stores to combat the practices of those people using self-checkout. I called it out at the time because it seemed like the ultimate dirty tactic the supermarkets could use – they clearly save money on checkout operator wages by putting in the self-checkouts, did NOT pass on any of the savings to customers, and were surprised when people took matters into their own hands.

They called their stock losses to error and stealing, “stock shrinkage.”

And especially now, when their prices are a blatant extortion scheme, directly resulting in changes to the inflation rate and forcing the Reserve to keep rates high, keeping financial hardship pressure on people, and then more than doubling many prices in just a few years, they should expect that people desperate to both keep a roof over their family’s heads AND also feed them, has led to a much higher “shrinkage” rate. Tough bickies, ColesWorth. Grow some morals and sense of honesty.

Because while a thing we consumers refer to as “shrinkflation” has been around for a decade or more by now, their new tactic of combining it with price gouging, price fixing, and “pre-loaded specials” is just the last straw. There’s a call in that last URL-linked article to force the labelling of “shrinkflated” products, where the quantity of a product in package is reduced but the price remains the same with clear labelling to indicate that the quantity has been reduced. Shrinkflation is often used in conjunction with pre-raising prices for several weeks, naming a “special” price that is actually the original price, and then using the new price as the “normal” price.

When we get conned by shrinkflation, why are we not referring to it as “quality of life shrinkage” or “value shrinkage” or “money shrinkage?”

Here’s a few images provided by an online acquaintance:



Images:

Provided by a contact on BlueSky, who informs me that the normal price was $3.70 several weeks before but had been raised to around double that before going on “special.” They are Bastards and we should treat them as such. (See my “Ted Talk” below.)

I do urge you to email Mr Albanese and the people making these decisions and asking for them to make shrinkflation labelling a requirement, but there’s this other excuse that I just know the cartel will try to use to wriggle out of it. They will say that they can only control such labelling on their own house brand products and thus this would clearly disadvantage their house brand products over independent producer’s brands.

But you know what I reckon? I reckon that this should be their problem. FSM knows that they already exercise so much control over their suppliers that they can easily do that. They can demand that labelling on any product they offer to keep on their shelves.

(I use the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) a lot in my writing because it’s a way to avoid using religious words and cuss words in. Yeah, sometimes I can be less aweary… Who knew?)

So anyway, I propose one further addition to the new recommendations too:

Standardised Unit Pricing:

All products on the shelves should, in addition to a standardised “price per quantity” pricing, include the following – “average price per quantity over the last four years.” Because most shoppers have gotten used to looking at that price per quantity, the supermarkets still have so much wriggle room in that, and forcing them to reveal their last four years’ worth of pricing would let you know how much they’ve raised their gouging game.

With a standardised unit price they can no longer obfuscate the value difference between ColesWorth and Foodworks or ALDI and shoppers when one might label a product as “$22 per 1kg” and another label the same product as “$2.20 per 100g” and yet another, as “$1.10 each” assuming that there are 20 of the items per 1kg. (They’re all the same price by the way. I’m using the mental image of a twenty-pack of 50g packs of spaghetti in this “offer.”)

Lastly, maybe the government could just fund an app that you can use to take a photo of each shelf or package label and then calculate the cheapest option for you and tell you where the item’s at best value. “AI” image recognition is now good enough that it can read labels, generate a table, and let you know all sorts of interesting things about the items you’re buying:

“This item <an economy twenty-pack of spaghetti> is the same value to you at Coles as you scanned the same item for at Woolworths, and interestingly enough, the price has gone up to almost double the price it was three years ago. The same item at ALDI would be $5.40 less expensive at ALDI where the price hasn’t gone up in two years.”

And if supermarkets have their catalogs online (and most do) then the AI could extract current prices off their catalogs and then you wouldn’t even need to bother with wandering about between stores, and instead just have the app tell you “This multipack of spaghetti is on special at you local Coles and that’s the cheapest price today.”

That would be one of the best uses of FOSS (Free Open Source Software, I believe?) to make a difference in people’s lives. Get onto the people in government that you can reach! And start demanding some justice…


My “Ted” Talk:
“Keep the bastards honest!”
The end, thank you for coming.

Ted Talks is in no way affiliated with TED Talks.


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