WASHINGTON — You’ve probably had that feeling: You tear open a bag of potato chips and your anticipation of fatty, salty goodness is tempered by the discovery that the bag is largely, maybe even mostly, air.
Everyone notices a price increase; keeping the price the same but giving you less is a lot harder to spot, and underfilling large packages — called “slack fill” — is even harder to detect. It’s not limited to potato chips, and there’s a law against making bigger packages to make it look like you’re getting — well, what you paid for.
But Consumer Reports says that after checking with the Food and Drug Administration it wasn’t able to find any sign of the FDA having cited any companies for breaking it recently.
StarKist did recently settle a class-action lawsuit in a California court, in which it was charged with under-filling its cans, and a deputy district attorney in California tells Consumer Reports that 27 companies have settled similar lawsuits in that state.
But for the most part, you’re on your own. And as Consumer Reports details, companies will pull some pretty sneaky stuff: It found that a standard bar of Ivory soap, for example, has gone down from 4.5 ounces to four; even sneakier, while 10-packs have the four-ounce bar, each bar in the 3-pack is only 3.1 ounces.
Hood ice cream sandwiches used to come in 12-packs; now, they come in 10-packs. Not only is the price the same; the box is bigger. The dimple on a peanut-butter jar can hide a lot of downsizing, the magazine found. And the discrepancy between the size of the packaging for over-the-counter drugs and the number of pills that are actually rattling around in that box or bottle is a particular pain.
The magazine says that it’s more important than ever to check the unit pricing when you’re comparison shopping, and not to fall for making decisions based on impressions — that’s exactly what manufacturers hope you do.
The entire story is in the November 2015 issue of Consumer Reports, including responses from manufacturers that vary in their weasel-ishness, without any promises to fix anything. It did, however, put one representative in the situation of actually saying the phrase “This helps Oreo stay relevant,” so there’s that.
