"That will be one dollar," said the clerk, so I gave her 80 cents.
"What's this?" she said, staring at the coins.
"It's a Dollar Lite!" I replied, beaming like Regis Philbin on ecstasy. "No it's not," she said. "It's three quarters and a nickel."
"It's our new health-conscious size," I insisted. "This dollar has 20 per cent fewer calories and zero trans fats."
"Try again."
"I'm going green," I said, putting on my Serious Face. "Our new, improved, smaller Dollar Lite reduces my carbon footprint."
Which is the line that one manufacturer tried on Victoria's Tom Romanuk when he asked why he was paying the same amount of money for a plastic jar of mayonnaise that had suddenly gotten smaller than the glass one it replaced. It takes fewer trucks to ship our new, smaller containers, Tom was told. Fewer trucks mean less gas. It's good for Mother Earth. You do love Mother Earth, don't you, Tom?
Tom was unswayed. It's the contents, not the size of the containers, that have caught his interest. The capacity of the mayonnaise jar had mysteriously shrunk from 940 ml to 890.
Ditto for the toilet rolls that had gone from more than 300 sheets to 280. Same price, less paper. "Ah, yes," that manufacturer's rep told him, "but there's more fibre." This momentarily confused Tom, who knew the nutritionists say we need more fibre, but....
Anyway, Tom has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about this business of same price, less product. Mayonnaise, toilet paper, orange juice, fast food, you name it, it's Alice In Wonderland time as consumer goods become smaller and smaller.
Seems companies facing rising ingredient costs are reluctant to scare off cash-poor shoppers with higher prices, so quietly reduce the size of the product instead. "It comes to the fore when times get tough," says Bruce Cran, president of the Consumers Association of sa国际传媒. "This is one of the first weapons manufacturers pull out." It's left to shoppers to keep an eye out for the changes. "They don't do it in six-inch print."
The U.S. website
consumerist.com blames the phenomenon on a nefarious device it calls the Grocery Shrink Ray, which magically reduces items on the shelves. Cereal boxes shrivel to the size of textbooks. Canned tuna swims in more water than before. Some bars and restaurants have adopted thick-bottomed glasses to reduce servings from 16 ounces to 14.
Over the past couple of years, the Consumerist has catalogued dozens of examples of U.S. products that have gone on Jenny Craig: Breyers ice cream melted from half a gallon to 1.75 quarts to 1.5. Dial soap went from 4.5 ounces to four. Wrigley's cut the number of sticks in a pack of Juicy Fruit to 15 from 17. (By the way, some Texas medical college researchers have just released a study showing that students who chew gum get higher math grades. I'm not making this up. The study was paid for by Wrigley. I'm not making that up, either.)
And on and on it goes: baby formula, baking soda, peanut butter, dog food. (It wasn't all bad news: The Consumerist also announced the invention of bacon-flavoured salt, arguably the most significant advance in Real Man Cuisine since the .308 calibre deer rifle.) In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that the sa国际传媒 was trimmed by the width of your thumb. I personally discontinued the use of compound modifiers and no longer skewer people with long names. George Stroumboulopoulos can count himself lucky. George Bush, not so much.
Which brings us to how you can adopt a less-is-more philosophy in your own life. Tell the phone company that you only want to pay for service between 8 a.m. and midnight.
Tell the cable company to only bill you for the channels you watch. Withhold the portion of taxes that finance political pork-barrelling.
Lower the age of majority and send your kids packing at age 14. Only make your side of the bed, wash your side of the car and do the dishes that you actually used. Make this morning's 10K run a nine and declare a best time. If anyone complains, just saying you're going green.
