- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
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“abandon their favorite brands” is a hell of a way to rephrase “can’t afford to continue eating what they have been previously”. Glad to see it reframed in a way that makes the companies seem like victims.
You mean the brands that are owned by like 5 companies?
Fuck em.
“WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE BRANDS!!!”
and somehow it’s all the Millennial’s fault - Damn (40 year old) kids!
In the 70s it felt like brands actually meant something. Since the 90s, they haven’t. Brands have milked their loyal followers for every last penny of profit while cheapening their products as much as they possibly can. Brands have become an anti-pattern for me, if a particular brand is “commanding a premium” that’s a sign to me to A) dig DEEP on pre-purchase quality information and if that’s hard to come by (which it usually is) B) walk away from the recognized brand name - assume it to be of inferior quality to go with its higher price.
I shopped in the same grocery store chain my grandparents and parents shopped in my whole life since the 1960s until about 8-10 years ago. At that point they started milking their brand loyalists and literally jacked our monthly food bill 2x, +100%, and that’s not industry wide inflation, that’s how much they inflated relative to the competition. We went from spending 90% of our food, soaps, pharmacy/drug store purchases there down to less than 5% in the first year after we quit them, and since then they now get less than 1% of our budget, only catching our purchases when they’re the only store open or other cases of extreme convenience purchasing. During the pandemic, we had instantcart deliver groceries from a competitor and a $120 delivered order, including $10 tip and delivery fees, were still far less expensive than the same products from the “leading” chain.
Remember when the Kellogg’s CEO told everyone that’s poor to just eat more cereal? And then tried to bust the union?
I can’t think of any food or drink (save for alcohol, but I cut down to one drink per week) that I’d buy because of the brand. The majority of what I’m buying is from store private labels. Living in Europe, however, I do pay close attention to country of origin, and try to buy as close to home as possible.
I stopped buying Campbell’s or any of its subsidiary brands a few years ago when they both raised prices and reduced the size of the can.
They were underhanded about it too because they made the cans slightly taller so it wasn’t obvious that they had less volume.
Shrinkflators can go F themselves. That shrunken package with the same, or often higher, price is a major incentive for me to buy their competitors’ products instead.
In a world where every product sucks due to years of cost cutting and shrinkflation, brands mean very little.
In foods especially, they have substituted corn syrup for sugar, steroid+antibiotic pumped milk and meat for “real” meat (typical market chicken is a travesty these past years), GMO crops sprayed with extreme weed killers and pesticides for simple sun and water grown food. They like to say our food bills are going down in real dollars, but they’re not, not if you buy organic GMO free - which is what most food used to be not so long ago.
Not only is the shit expensive, but may as well eat a bowl of ice cream with as much sugar as a lot of cereal has. Having cereal for breakfast daily is akin to using soda for hydration. It sure tastes good, but I’ve cut down on my cereal intake for multiple reasons.
Having cereal for breakfast daily is akin to using soda for hydration.
Well, I was born in the 1960s and honey coated chocolate sugar bombs were already the cereal of choice among my kindergarten classmantes - and soda for hydration was pretty standard then too.
So true, and worse, most cereal is just carbs to begin with!
Basically your breakfast is sugar on sugars.
Framing this as a customer loss is funny. Switching brands means it’s the brands that are losing, geniuses.
Pretty mind blowing to think maybe people don’t need 200 variations of the same sugary grains.
This was the big eye opener when we ditched our near-monopoly chain grocery for a smaller competitor. Smaller stores, but they had more employees stocking the shelves and more cashiers so you waited less to get out. And in the jelly aisle they had 4 flavors instead of 84. Six kinds of cereals plus six more granolas to choose from, not an endless aisle of $8 wafer thin boxes of sugar coated puffed grains with familiar cartoon characters on the front. Five flavors of ice-cream, not 205. 20 types of yogurt, not 386. It took a little while to get used to the idea that I couldn’t get my preferred brand and size of grape jelly, but after I tried their one option - organic and half the price per ounce of the chain competitors - I decided: grape jelly is grape jelly, this one is fine.
P.S. - I feared I may have been exaggerating, but the above numbers are accurate - I overestimated a little on jelly at first, but pretty much nailed the ice-cream and yogurt first try.
Facts.
I quit drinking soda this month because the off-brand soda I like inexplicably stop being sold by every store in the area, probably due to the Iran War, and RC Cola, Pepsi, and Coke all cost the same gouged prices. I could just take the price gouging and buy them anyway, but I’d rather quit consuming it out of spite.
That it’s healthier is just a side bonus.
I don’t want to create a run on the fresh mint sections of the groceries, but you might try buying a package of mint (generally about $1.65 around here) rinsing it off and putting it (the mint, not the package) in a pitcher of water in the fridge. Zero sugar, fresh flavor, and I generally can refill a 1/2 gallon pitcher of water 6-10 times per package of mint. Toward “end of life” the mint will start to oxidize and make mint tea instead of mint water - slightly different but still nice IMO flavor, the brown coloring doesn’t mean it’s bad (unless it gets CocaCola dark, mine never has gone that far…)
I think the other bad part is even the no name brands have ramped up prices as well… for a bit it was pretty good, but I feel like a lot of them just ended up pricing themselves the same as they did before, which is like .50 cents less or maybe a $1 less than the main brand. At that point i say its not even worth it and either decide on just buying the name brand cause the savings is dumb or just not buy it again until they lower the price or it goes on a good sale.
That’s actually great news. Sugar is a hell of a drug and quitting soda is a big step in less sugar consumption. I enjoy water and hot tea usually at work, but my co-workers love soda. One of them got a kidney stone and the doctor told her it’s because you were drinking 5 cans of soda a day.
Hell yeah. :)
I would abandon the brands I currently use, but Great Value is as cheap as it gets
I think there was a really interesting part right at the bottom that was briefly mentioned. A lot of people are using A.I. to shop now. Probably not the Lemmy demographic. But people are willing to trust the A.I. when it gives them a recommendation, even if it’s for a new brand they’ve never heard of before. This is an unprecedented level of marketing if the numbers in the article are correct. No advertising can compete with “artificial word of mouth” directly changing a customer’s opinion.
My prediction is companies will notice this, fast, and there will be incentives for A.I. to become like a new advertising platform. How much do you think Grok can charge to recommend one product over the other if it can have such a high (near 40%) lead conversion?
404 media has an interesting podcast episode on “AEO” (AI SEO) and how it can be manipulated. Apple link
So it’s like SEO then. It’s always been a scammers game. Blast sites with bot comments about your site, write slop articles that merge things that have nothing to do with what they are named for the sake of SEO, add tags, and specific words through the page. This is just an extension of the scum.
SEO started the day after the first search engine, with sysops begging other sysops to list their boards on the front page of links. It has evolved massively since then, but manipulation of AI results is just another form of SEO, and the AI results we have today are already heavily influenced by the SEOed content they were trained on and that they RAG from.
The one brand that I am seeing rise in price for me is Spindrift.
I was just thinking the other day that their business model has got to be a lot more supply chain and energy dependent than many of the “fizzy waters”.
For those who don’t know, its a low calorie soda because its simply real juice in small quantities as the flavoring.
So they must have to source fresh fruits, then extract them, then pasteurize everything, and only then make the soda.
I don’t drink a lot of it, but its about the only soda I am willing to give the kids.
Clue: products’ retail prices have almost NOTHING to do with what they cost to produce and deliver and sell to you. It’s almost entirely about what people are willing to pay.
A lot of people are willing to pay more for a product they perceive as more expensive to produce, but that perception is often far from the truth.
I drink Waterloo. Just water and a little natural flavoring. No sugar, salt, or calories, and it’s much cheaper than Spindrift. I love the Peach best.
Yeah, its ok. I always wonder what is “natural flavoring?” that can mean nearly anything.
At least waterloo claims that they are extracts. Which is nice.
I really like that spindrift actually tastes like the flavoring because it is the flavoring. Its worth more to me.
Either way, my post was about how many ways they are going to be effected by rising costs.
can mean nearly anything.
Yep. Extract of cat urine is 100% natural.
Oh no! Those poor brands!
I find Aldi and Lidl have healthier variants of namebrand cereals.
We shop at Aldi a lot, but we also have Trader Joes and I fairly consistently prefer the Trader Joes’ products to the Aldi alternatives - Aldi seems to be aiming for the absolute lowest possible cost of delivery, and when that means rotting fruit in the produce section becasue they’re understaffed / undermanaged… combined with high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar in most of the processed products, lines 12 customers deep at the one open checkout, etc. it gets to be a turn-off.
