Am I Being Cheated?

[Wilma]

How about thickness?  I think I could read our tissue paper thin newspaper through the tissues I use.

[Janet Harrington]

Oh my gosh, Mother.  What will you think of next?   

[Roma Jean Turner]

     I'm stickin' with my Puffs Plus, my nose and I are happy with them.  Thanks for your research date sixdogsmom.

[W. Gray]

I suppose that if the Kleenex tissues are shorter but the box is the same length, the Kleenex people are trying to insure they don't lose any shelf space.

They are probably charging the same price so that they don't lose any revenue but it would seem their production cost has gone down.

Or, they may claim that they shorted the tissues so that they would not have to raise the price.

It shouldn't be too long before a consumer organization picks up on that.

A half gallon of ice cream in the major brands is no longer a half gallon because of the policies the manufacturers follow.

Has anyone noticed that toilet tissue rolls are becoming narrower?

[Wilma]

Yes.  They no longer fill up the holder.  When you pull off some the roll jiggles back and forth on the spindle.  There is at least an inch of spindle at the end of the cardboard tube.

[larryJ]

A lot of products are "slimming down" or reducing the size of the product.  I first noticed this a little while back while purchasing a 3 lb. can of coffee that was no longer 3 lbs.  The price remained the same for the most part, but some stores were raising the price.  

When I began my career at the Los Angeles Times, the width of the paper roll loaded into the presses was 58".  This was reduced to 55", then 52", then 48" and now I hear they are retooling the presses to handle a 44" roll.  The savings in the cost of newsprint is worth the expense of changing the size of the printing cylinders, the size of the printing plates, the size of the inking and water rollers as well as the size of the printing plate machines in the platemaking department.  While the newspaper is still printed as a broadsheet, it is possible that the format could be changed to a tabloid style paper similar to the Rocky Mountain News.

And, of course, there is that possibility, as discussed elsewhere on the forum, of the demise of a printed product in favor of online news.

I have noticed that some canned goods are slightly smaller, bags of chips don't have the same amount and some breads have smaller slices or less slices than before.  But the prices are not reflecting the change.  

Now the question is, after the economy recovers, will the manufacturers return to the way things were, or will they just pay less for their costs of goods and keep the prices consumers pay at the same level?

Larryj

[W. Gray]

In Eureka, last week, I noticed that the Eureka Herald has slimmed down to the newspaper width of 12 inches from their former gigantic width size.

[Wilma]

My brother asked if I had noticed the size of the Wichita Eagle lately.  Then we talked about how we used to fold the paper to throw it.  I decided to see if I could still do the fold.  I could do the fold but the paper couldn't.  It was too narrow for the tuck in part to hold.