Yeah, it's not home repair. But, it's an open forum. Have the moderator email me.
Red Baron microwave pizza singles. Pack of two pizzas, plus the foil heat up tray. About $3.49 at Wegmans. I'm in walmart, and they have the same thing for about three bucks. I buy a couple, and figure I'm saving money.
Got the pizzas home, and opened one today. It's really tiny. About half inch diameter smaller than the Wegmans version. Thin, and light, too. I look at the box from Wegmans, I had a while ago. It's 12 ounces. The Walmart one is
6.80 ounces. Blast! Same price, and half the food?
Just finished cooking one, and I'm still hungry. The second one is in the microwave. If I'd been eating Wegmans version of Red Baron Singles, I'd be satisfied with one. Not much savings, here. While I was throwing away the package, I see they are "thin and crispy". Not the deep dish I am used to.
It's been SOP in recent years for stores/manufacturers to reduce the size of a product instead of raising prices. Some OJ containers are no longer a full gallon. Cookie boxes are smaller. What used to be sold in quart sizes is now 28 ozs. It goes on and on.
One local store had a sign near their brand of ice cream: "Still the original 1/2 gallon". Everything else was like 1.8 quarts for the same price.
The only way to shop today is to compare unit prices - but the buyer must beware there also. I've seen paper towels unit-priced per 100 sheets. One brand appeared to be cheaper, until you checked their sheet size. It was one of the brands where you could tear off 1/2 sheets and they were unit priced to the 1/2 sheet. Do the math and they were 50% more expensive than some other brands.
Now let's throw rebates and coupons into the mix. In some cases, using coupons/rebates on smaller, higher-unit priced items can be more economical than using them on the large sizes if the percentage off the original price drops the unit price down far enough.
Bottom line is - Shopping by unit pricing, while ensuring that the units are comparable and by factoring in rebates and coupons, is the way to go.
Yeah, "tricks" have been played for years, but it's much more recent occurance that the old standards - gallons of juice, 1/2 gallons of ice cream, pounds of xyz, etc. - have begun to get downsized in order to hold the price "constant".
We're going through a similiar situation with our county taxes this year - "I promise not to raise property taxes during my term". Now we pay a fee/higher fee for items that used to be covered by our taxes. In essence, they kept the price constant while reducing the size of the product.
I'm reminded of toilet paper. The number of sheets is useless as a way to tell how much is in a package. I pick it up and see how heavy it is. Sometimes I see a store advertising a 4-roll package (often its own brand) for a low price. I pick it up and can tell there's almost nothing there.
There's also the significant possibility of never getting the rebate. That could be one reason for processing rebates so slooooooowly. They're hoping you'll forget you sent for it.
In about 1998, Texas had some school-tax agency called a "SED" that collected property tax as well as the school district itself. The schools were claiming a tax decrease, while it was effectively an 80% INCREASE.
Currently, our County Executive is floating a budget proposal that substantially decreases a tax rebate that has been in effect for many years as well as redirecting some money that was destined for the county schools. If it passes, she can still claim she didn't raise our property taxes but in the end it will be more money out of our pockets every year - less money back in the rebate and probably higher school and town taxes.
It's not that I have a problem with spending more money if it needs to be spent, it's the games they play in how they explain it. They don't say they've decreased the rebate, they don't say they've redirected any funds, they simply say - "Once again we've balanced the budget without raising your property taxes". Now it's up to those who oppose the budget (or at least want to get the whole picture out) to try and explain the nuances of the proposal to the layman in a manner that they can understand.
But who gets the most press coverage? The County Executive, of course. She can drop a line about her "balanced budget" at every community event, playground ribbon cutting, and high school award ceremony. Where she goes, the press goes, so her words get heard more often, and her words are a lot easier to understand than the explanation of what she's actually doing.
The spillover makes it even worse. You have school and town boards that are otherwise doing a great job, but now they have to increase their taxes or cut services to compensate for the lost county revenue. What's going to happen during the next election campaign? Opposition candidates are going to point to the actions of the current boards and tell everyone that they can't handle the finances correctly. Let's toss 'em all out.
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