On Monday the Daily Mail claimed Shoppers 'cheated' as supermarket brands downsize - so you pay the same for less. This article rightly pointed out that many packages are being downsized to obscure quite major price increases. A given package will have a certain weight or volume, say 250 g, and a certain price; then the manufacturer downsizes the package to say 200 g while keeping the price the same. So you pay the price for 80% of what you previously got - a 25% increase. The manufacturer hopes that you will not notice the difference in quantity and will simply see the shelf label price as being the same.

 downsizing
Courtesy of Daily Mail

Of course this sort of ripoff is old. I recall going to my tuck shop at school in the 1970s to buy Mars bars. After a while I had the feeling that the bars were getting smaller but was not 100% sure. Then suddenly a few years later there would be the "new format" extra large Mars bar with an extra large price to go with it.

Right now I am very suspicious of packages that are in strange numbers of grams e.g. 907 g, 454 g, 227 g etc. If you pick up a pack of coffee with 227 g you might think it is cheaper than the 250 g package further down the shelf, but in practice it may not be.

The good news is that there is a way of comparing different sized packages that most of my friends and colleagues seem blissfully unaware of. For some years now it has been compulsory for supermarkets to display the unit price of a package alongside the package price.

 Unit pricing

The picture of a shelf label from Asda shows that the 250 g package of butter costs £1.05. However the small print (upper left) shows that the unit price is 42 p per 100 g. The unit price allows you to compare the prices regardless of whether the package is 227 g, 250 g or 300 g.

Typically when the Government introduced this as a compulsory measure following an EU Directive:
a) the Government did not bother to tell consumers that this was something to check to avoid ripoffs like downsizing
b) the Daily Mail denounced it bitterly as yet another example of the bad boys in Brussels interfering in the UK. This is quite hypocritical as this helps prevent the ripoff they rightly exposed on Monday. However their editorial policy seems to denounce the EU whatever the pretext.