Misc. Ramblings

The local Republican controlled radio station is touting the low rate of inflation and points to this as proof that Republicans know how to run the economy efficiently. Once I stopped laughing and got up from rolling on the floor I thought about what I call hidden inflation.

Hidden inflation is when you get less of a product or service but pay the same price as before. The cost, per unit of product increases, but the price you pay stays relatively level. Hence, the price increase is hidden.

I recently saw what may be an example of this when we went shopping for dog food. Dog food you say? Yes, dog food. We went to the Longs Drugs (a very popular store here in Hawaii that sells everything from sushi to slippers) to buy some dog food for our grand dog. It seems little "Chica", a terrier-mix breed may have an allergy to some types of dog food. We don't know yet what she is allergic to so we decided to try different brands of dog food and see her reaction to each. But in reading the ingredients on the back of the cans, we found this had very little relation to what the front of the can said it contained. For example, if it said "Hearty Beef" (all names are fictitious to protect the guilty) on the front, the back label ingredients would say water, poultry products, barley, rice, wheat, etc., followed somewhere by "beef byproducts." So we took a look at a can saying, on the front, that it was "Lively Liver." But the back label said water, poultry products, barley, rice, wheat, etc., followed somewhere by "liver." In fact, every single can of dog food we looked at, regardless of the brand or what the front of the can said it contained, had the same major ingredients: water, poultry products, barley, rice, wheat, etc.

Another example, SWMBO recently made up some goody bags for Christmas. Part of what she included were some small bags of candy. These small bags were part of a larger bag that held about 20 of these smaller bags. She noticed that while the price had not gone up much since last Christmas, the number of smaller packets contained in the larger bag had decreased and the weight of each smaller bag had also gone down.

A last example, some products have made the change from the English measurement system to metric. But instead of doing the math and just labeling it with the correct metric equivalent to what was there before, they gave you less and then listed that metric equivalent. Since most people don't carry calculator with them and don't know the conversion tables even if they did, it was a sneaky way to cover a cost increase.

While I certainly haven't taken any kind of scientific survey of products, I get the feeling that there are many other examples of products or services that have been reduced but without lowering the price. This literally increases the price per unit but hides the cost increase (or at least attempts to hide the increase).

But the net effect is you pay more if you purchase the same amount you used to get.

Aloha!