Sneaky Manufacturers Shrink Packaging, While Keeping Prices the Same

I am in it, and this point about necessarily passing increased commodity costs down to the consumer is not always true. Product managers have a short term incentive to make more profit any way they can regardless of cost increases or decreases to commodities. If they make more bottom line, they get more bonus, they get promoted faster. Tactics to make packaging appear deceptively larger are called package improvements. Formulation changes for food that still legally meet quality claims on the packaging but use cheaper less beneficial ingredients are seen as "opportunities" to increase the profit margin of the product. When commodity prices go down, like the fluctuating price of coffee for example, the manufacturers hold off as long as they can watching the competition every day to see how long they can use the expensive commodity excuse until they "have to" reduce the cost for the consumer. And then the cost reduction is symbolic, never really proportional to the actual decrease. That is just part of the real world behind food manufacturing.

Like the industries who say they "have to" slash wages and benefits to stay competitive, or who say they "have to" relocate to some banana republic where the local tyranny doesn't care what a multi-national does with their waste products or workers lives, the idea that businesses "have to" pass on to the consumer every expense or go broke....is bull**it. They no more "have to" pass on every cost than they are likewise forced to lower prices when that particular manufacturing cost increase can no longer be justified by high sugar-cane (for example) prices.

That's a myth, just like the others the Kochs or USCofC have their Walkers out selling to the gullible. It's merely one of another like the supposed inability to observe US environmental/safety regs while paying workers what they always have; or how the "invisible hand" of capitalism ensures businesses do the right thing - even in the absence of laws requiring them to do....something they insist makes the need to monitor tindustry, or have such laws on the books, unneccesary of course; or the one about low/no taxes on industry being the best way to increase their hiring capacity....that and government subsidies covering plant construction costs, resource mining costs, etc., also being a "great" job stimulus too!!
These are such blatant, obvious, self-serrving myths that it seems incredible they would even dare to pass them off. But they know their target audience only too well. A half-century of Cold War rhetoric has Americans, alone of the world's developed economies, refusing more and cheaper health-care for themselves and their own children. A literal display of the bumper-sticker logic that has it we are "better dead than Red"..or apprently even /slightly/ socialist. Fools.