Anyone else notice the "stealth" price increase for ice cream?

[Stinky The Clown]

I was at the local Safeway this afternoon. As I was cruising for the fixin's for the repast Sparkly's gunna make tonight (vegetable soup) I got a jones on for some ice cream. So I waddle on over there and pick two flavors I like. The ice cream case was kinda bare, however. Oddly so. Even for a Sunday afternoon. So instead of 'choosing' I had to 'settle'. I got two half gallons of Safeway's premium house brand, Safeway Select. I got 'em in the cart and I'm thinkin' ..... 'these look small to me ... " I pick one up.

Aha! .... '1.75 qt'

Wha' hoppin' to the other "0.25 qt'?

So I go back to the ice cream aisle. Sure enuff ... every other premium brand (usually sold in tubs, where the regular stuff is sold in bricks) is also the same '1.75 qt'.

I haven't bought ice cream, literally, since Christmas, when I bought some Spumoni. I know for a fact that was a full half gallon.

Damn ..... what's next? Remember when they did this with coffee? And seeereeeall? What else?

sheesh .....

[politicat]

1. Ice, IQF chicken, sausage, bacon And then there's the saline solution....

Lots of things that used to be round pounds or round numbers have become smaller recently.

There's a reason we still get our frozen yogurt and light ice cream from Schwans - they're not horribly red, or no more red than the local grocery chains, and their containers are still 56 ounces, like they've been since introduction.

Sausage links are down to 12 ounce packages (noticed this since Mr. Pcat is a fan of them) and bacon is down to a 12 ounce package as well.

Ice is a terrible rip-off; in ten years, it's gone from a 10 pound bag at 99 cents to a 6 pound bag at $1.29 - the price has doubled, from about 9 cents a pound to about 21 cents a pound. I try not to buy it, but there are times I go through it faster than I can make it.

I used to be able to buy 5 pounds of IQF chicken breasts (which work very well for two people who don't like chicken bones) without a saline injection for $7.99. Now the same bag is 3.5 pounds, and I'm buying 20% saline solution.

Pork tenderloins are also injected with this saline stuff, up to 30%.

[Warpy]

3. Thanks for reminding me why I shop at the food co-op

and am mostly vegetarian, with rare free range chicken on the menu (holidays and my birthday).

Supermarket stuff is really adulterated crap. The more processed it is, the more adulterated it is.

However, those saline injections do allow you to skip brining your meat.

[woofless]

4. 56 ounces is1.75 quarts, same as Husb2Sparkly bought.

[SoCalDem]

2. This practice is rampant in the grocery industry..

Look at the containers, though.. they are often the same size. Our eyes are accustomed to seeing a one pound can and a 3 pound can of coffee, and most people do not even notice that there is mush less inside.. Cereals have doen this too., The unit price tags tell the truth, but when a "new" one shows up, you have no frame of reference, because the old one is gone..

When I notice a "change", I will start looking at Big Lots (pic n save) and sure enough the cans of coffee with the larger content will show up there.. Stores dump the ohes with more, so that customers do not even notice.. I still find FULL POUND cans of coffee from time to time at Big Lots..:)

[ernstbass]

5. Breyers has been doing this for several years

especially wit the "speciality" flavors

[trotsky]

6. I first noticed it with Edy's Whole Fruit Sorbet.

They always sold it in 1.5 pint sizes, bigger than most of the premium brands (like Ben & Jerry's). Then, probably realizing that people didn't notice they were getting MORE for the price, they cut it down to just 1 pint to match the other brands.

(Or maybe they cut down from 2.0 to 1.5? I can't remember.)

[Stinky The Clown]

7. Its 1 pt ... I buy those regularly, whenever they're on sale.

Hagen Daaz and Safeway Select are the same size - 1 pt - and it seems to me (not completely sure) they've been that way here for years.

[housewolf]

8. Look at the price of butter

it's doubled in the last year from around $2.50 per lb to $5.00 per lb last week in my supermarket. Milk has gone up a lot too over the past year - not as much as butter but about 30% or so. Half & half is up from about $1.10 per qt to about #1.89. All dairy products have increased by huge percentages over the past year.

The dog food I buy (Nutro's Lamb & Rice) is up 50%, from $24 per bag to $37 per bag.

[Lugnut]

9. Our locally owned

Shur-Save market had their house brand butter on sale for 2 lbs/$4.00 last week. They've been running this special for the past two months or so. $5.00/lb is obscene.

[politicat]

10. Mom's in Mesa, and she's complaining about the price of milk, too

This is what I tell her, so.... I'm not trying to be rude, but you (all) in the Southwest need to know how badly your water consumption hurts people further up the watershed and those not on the watershed who are affected by legal decisions that grant you cheap water.

The drought here in the midwest and upper Ogallala aquifer basin in 2000-2003 did a lot of damage to the dairy herds. Colorado and Kansas produce about 25% of the milk used in the western states. Ranchers were forced to slaughter because they couldn't afford to feed their herds when the hay in the fields died. The herds have not recovered, and until we have six or seven wet years in a row, they're not likely to. We're still recovering the water table. (As it happens, the Ogallala is in very bad shape. It may never recover.)

We're not blameless- we allowed unbridled growth in some municipalities; but we're trying very hard to correct those mistakes. Maricopa county isn't - they're still approving building permits and allowing bluegrass sod - Mom works for a landscape construction company. A new tract house requires 100,000 gallons of water to be built, and 2 million gallons in the first year after construction. LA Metro, Las Vegas Metro, and San Diego are equally bad, though LA has some growth restrictions, and San Diego is starting to catch on.

So, irrigation water for the Colorado Plains and Kansas was pretty much gone because we've had to pump water out of the Eastern Colorado reservoirs back over the Rockies to meet Arizona, California and Nevada requirements; Rio Colorado treaty requirements to Mexico have not been met for 15 years. (You think you've got it bad? Try living in Mexico in Baha.)

Farmers and ranchers in Eastern Colorado and Kansas and Nebraska have been getting less than 70% of their water allotment because of federally enforced (later) claims from the Colorado River watershed. (These are currently in re-negotiation, so there is likely to be less water coming out of that watershed for the desert dwellers.) This is basically enough to go broke on. Each year, they are less able to meet their financial obligations because they don't have the water they need, so they end up selling out, slaughtering their herds, or becoming tenant farmers to ADM and Monsanto.

Am I a bit bitter when I see Phoenix-metro golf courses being watered at noon? A little. The backyard swimming pools and expanses of grass don't make me really happy either. So I'm sorry you're now paying for your cheap water in your food budget. But that's the way it goes. Finite resource and all that.