What a Bargain!

I am so weary of hearing about the price of a gallon of gas. It is what it is and I notice we keep buying it regardless. Whether the outrageous price is due to a shortage…or a conspiracy…or a manipulation of the futures market, we keep buying and consuming the golden fuel. We can’t live without it and we are quite unwilling to significantly alter our lifestyle. We sure drive a hard bargain! Let’s send our message loud and clear: “No matter how high you raise the price, we are going to buy! We’ll show you!”

But I am extremely upset over what I witnessed in the grocery store. It’s been a while since I purchased ice cream. Oh, I may have driven through Dairy Queen a time or two for a chocolate dipped cone. And I seem to remember a trip to Ben & Jerry’s for a tiny (but expensive) dip of cookies ‘n’ cream. So you will understand my shock at what I encountered in the freezer section of my local grocer last week.

I had placed my staple items in the cart. Diet Coke, Fresca, Diet Coke, bananas, whole wheat bread, jelly, peanut butter, 1% milk, Diet Coke and Diet Coke. I experienced an epiphany on Aisle 7. I wanted a half-gallon of Breyers butter pecan ice cream. As I opened the freezer and reached for the carton, I thought my eyes were experiencing some sort of optical illusion. The half-gallon carton looked the same but smaller. Sure enough. The half-gallon package is now 1.5 quarts. I looked at the price. It had gone from $3.79 to $5.69.

The only reasoning I could come up with was this: Someone at the Breyers team must have sat in the Monday morning meeting and said, “I know! Rather than to raise the price of ice cream, let’s just cut the package size down by 25%. I doubt our consumers will even notice as long as we keep the same look.”

Not to be outdone, the new kid at the table said, “A true ice cream lover will notice. Let’s just raise the price. As long as we keep the increase under two bucks, no one will complain…look what they’ve done to gasoline. Who’s going to notice ice cream? We won’t do it in one jump. We’ll raise it in slow small increments over 21 days.”

The CEO clapped his hands in delight. “Give these kids each a corner office! This is brilliant. We’ll reduce the size of the carton significantly AND increase the price dramatically. This is pure genius!” Turning to the oldies at the table, he said, “See, this is innovation. This is forward thinking. We must move beyond traditional value-based thinking.”

We, the consumers, are left scratching our collective head, thinking, “Huh? What just happened?”

Meanwhile, next week we’ll save 70 cents on the frozen calories with our VIC card and think, “What a bargain! I paid only $4.99 for a quart and a half of ice cream.” We’ll be perfectly pleased as we sit in front of the TV and consume our completely renewable, all natural resource…and look at the money we are saving on gas by staying home!