The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Cookies

I like cookies. It’s hard for me to turn down a good, soft cookie – which is part of the reason my weight is where it is.

At work, our snack cabinet is regularly stocked with various high-fat, high-sugar, low-nutrition edibles for me and my other well-fed coworkers to indulge upon. One of my favorites is Grandma’s Homestyle Peanut Butter cookies. I grab a pack of those cookies far more often than I care to admit. They’re not the best peanut butter cookies in the world, but they’re the best ones that I have quick and easy access to.

But when the cabinet was last restocked, I noticed that my cookie’s package had changed. Immediately, warning bells started sounding in my head, especially since they made a point to highlight the packaging change. After reading about the grocery shrink ray at The Consumerist for months, I knew it was likely that my beloved lunchtime snack had fallen victim to the same fate. I fished into my small trashcan at work and found a wrapper from earlier in the week.

Alas, my suspicions were confirmed. The change in packaging was designed to divert attention away from the decrease in product size. The Grocery Shrink Ray had foiled me again.

More and more, we will see our favorite foods being shrunk to hide price changes by the manufacturer. Price increases are a normal part of market economics as inflation will continue dragging prices up. While you don’t have much choice but to go along with the changes, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a few tools you can use to still save money while prices increase.

Check the Unit Price

The truest way to gauge the difference in price between similar items is to compare their unit prices. Basically, it’s determining the price per standard unit for your item of choice. For dry goods, such as cereal or flour, dollars per ounce is my unit of choice. For liquid goods, price per fluid ounce or gallon (depending on the item) works best.

For example, the cookie package is sold from our snack cabinet for $0.50. Now that the package is 2 1/2 ounces, the unit price is $0.20/ounce – up from a unit price of $0.182/ounce (a 9.89% increase).

Don’t Always Trust the Signage

While many grocery stores are saving you a lot of manual price checking by including the unit price on their price signage, sometimes they don’t get updated right after a product change. This means the unit price on the sign can’t always be trusted. If the size of the product hasn’t changed in a while, it’s likely that the listed unit price will be correct, but you should always do a quick mental-math check, just in case.

Keep a Price Book

A price book can be invaluable for finding and tracking the best deals from store to store, and from shopping trip to shopping trip. The key is to track every item on your shopping list and write down the unit price for each item on the same sheet every time you go to the store. For example, here’s a snippet from my wife’s price book sheet for “eggs”:

The Cavewife’s Price Book: Eggs

By tracking the dates and the stores we’ve shopped for eggs, we can see that the price has been decreasing at Aldi lately and is significantly lower than the local grocery store. By tracking this data, we know we’re likely to get the best price for eggs at Aldi the next time we go shopping.

Unfortunately, we can’t defeat the grocery shrink ray, but we can defend ourselves against it. Just be alert and keep track of those unit prices and you’ll never be quietly ripped off again.