Price hikes pushing consumers to abandon their favorite brands

In a world where every product sucks due to years of cost cutting and shrinkflation, brands mean very little.

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.

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.

Framing this as a customer loss is funny. Switching brands means it’s the brands that are losing, geniuses.

I would abandon the brands I currently use, but Great Value is as cheap as it gets

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.

Oh no! Those poor brands!

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?

I find Aldi and Lidl have healthier variants of namebrand cereals.

Cereal prices killed me. I went to generics which were fine and then they got too expensive. So I learned to make my own, sugar smacks are really easy to make and taste WAY better. Plus you can tweak the recipe like I add toasted almonds in mine, local honey, etc.

Jerky was the other, bought a dehydrator and wait for skirt to be on sale. I have a clone of Wild Bills and I’m good to go.

And you can do so much more w/ a dehydrator. Veggie? You can make awesome fruit strips/etc

vote with your money, if a company or brand doesn’t respect you or fight for your business then starve them out

Fuck brands. Buy less shit.

Capitalism cannibalising itself one brand at a time.

I honestly can’t trust any brands and their packaging because of shrinkflation.

Eveytime I go into a grocery store i see packaging stay the same size but the amount inside the packages keeps getting smaller and smaller.

In the image below for example now frozen fruits come 50% less filled, and the price has gone up from the originally 600g.

I stopped buying cereal years before covid. A recent trip to the grocery store took me through the cereal aisle and I happened to stop to pay closer attention. The shrunken boxes and jacked up prices were very apparent. Yet another reason not to buy that unhealthy trash.