The contents of bags of chips and boxes of cookies have not always decreased. It has even happened in the past that the opposite has happened.
The subject has even been the subject of very serious studies whose main interest was not to document the impact of the increase in the cost of inputs on the formats of the products offered, but rather the impact of the increase portion size on consumer weight.
We recall, for example, that the first bottles of Coca-Cola, in 1916, only came in one format and only had a capacity of 177 ml, whereas today we cannot find anything more small as 222 ml “mini cans”, alongside which appear all sorts of other larger formats, up to 2 liters. As for individual bags of chips, the smallest (38 g) and largest (65 g) of the Yum Yum brand found, in 2019, the authors of a study by the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec were two or three times larger than their first version in 1966 (22 g).
Started in the 1970s, but particularly marked between the end of the 1980s and that of the 1990s, this increase in portion size was appropriate for chocolate bars, bags of candy, ice cream sticks or meals at fast food chains. In the latter case, the original size of McDonald’s fries in 1955 (68 g), for example, has long been surpassed, not only by the large (178 g) and medium (110 g) portions, but even by the small (75 g).
Changing purchasing power
These stories are good examples of two phenomena that have also been observed in other industries, explains Maryse Côté-Hamel, professor of consumer sciences at Laval University. On the one hand, they arise from the advancement of production methods which have made it possible to manufacture and sell these food products at lower cost. On the other hand, they reflect an increase in the purchasing power of households, “for whom the price of these products in proportion to their budget has become relatively more affordable, which has enabled them to buy them more often and more large quantity “.
It’s the same phenomenon that happened with flat-screen televisions, she gives as an example. Here too the first models were expensive, not that advanced and reserved for the wealthiest consumers. But with technological advancement and mass production, better and much cheaper models gradually became more widespread.
Furthermore, when the increase in the costs of producing goods or services occurs in periods of relative prosperity, companies will seek less to trick consumers and will more readily pass it off directly in the form of an equivalent increase in prices, explains Maryse Côté-Hamel. It is when the increase in production costs is exceptionally strong or when it occurs while households are tighter in their budgets – as during economic crises – that companies will tend to resort to reflation strategies. or deskilling.
The world of air transport has gone through similar periods, notes Marc-Antoine Vachon, professor and holder of the Transat Chair of Tourism at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Here again, air travel has long been reserved for a certain economic elite. The invention of larger aircraft, the appearance of discount carriers and the incentives offered by countries wanting to attract tourists have led to a democratization of air transport.
“We are perhaps witnessing today a form of swing of the pendulum, with the consolidation of airlines, the reaching of a certain maturity of certain destinations and better consideration of the environmental costs of air transport. »