"Doug Miller" wrote in message
. ..
In article , "Doug Kanter"
wrote:

Why not call a few manufacturers and see what their logic was. Start with
Sherwin-Williams. Continue with General Mills, Kraft. Del Monte etc etc
etc.
Maybe they found out from focus groups that the smaller package was a
better
idea. There might be a reason for this. Think about it. Let's say you have
a
fairly strict food budget. $100 a week, to pick a number. Now, your
favorite
ice cream goes up $1.00 in price. 5 cans of beans go up a quarter each.
Your
detergent does the same, along with paper goods. Add it all up and perhaps
your bill is now $120.00. You may say you can adjust to that, but a whole
lot of people can't. So, who should the manufacturers cater to?

What part of "getting less for your money" are you having such a hard time
understanding? The alternatives are pretty clear: spend more to buy the
same,
or spend the same to buy less. Neither one is at all desirable from the
consumer's POV.

Suppose five cans of beans go up a quarter each (while the size stays the
same) and you can't afford the increase, so you buy only four.

Alternatively, suppose that the amount of product in the can is cut by
twenty
percent while the price stays the same. You buy five cans, just like you
always have, but now you're getting only as much beans as you used to get
with
four.

Either way, you spent the same amount of money buying four cans' worth of
beans that *used* to buy you five cans' worth.

Thanks for the math lesson. Let's eliminate one possible reason for such
changes, even though it's equally likely to BE the reason. Here it is:

A bunch of suits sit around a conference table discussing how they all want
to dump their company's stock, which has been flat for 3 years. So, they
MUST increase profits. They can either cook the books, or they can actually
raise profits. They decide to do it by screwing the consumer.

Keep in mind that I said this ***** IS ***** a possible reason.

Now that we've eliminated evil as a motive, what's left? As a person who
understands business, what OTHER reasons can you come up with? There HAVE to
be reasons. What are they?