When the cost of labour, raw materials, and services continue to grow incessantly, the cost of goods and services too go up. However, when microeconomic fundamental sway, manufacturers, and consumers also respond by ensuring that they are on the safe side.
For the manufacturers in Kenya as well as across the border, the best thing most companies do in such a scenario is to increase the prices of the products or reduce the weight of the products by a small amount, but also keep the prices constant.
But while consumers have been struggling to keep up with rising costs of living, when the cost of the products are rising and are also viewed as essential, the much they do is to reduce the consumption rate or look for a substitute to the product.
On the corporate side, they try to use many tricks to keep the prices of their products unchanged in order to win the confidence of consumers. This is what manufacturing companies such as Unilever does when it comes to products such as Close-Up.
For a while since 2007, the size or weight of Close-Up have continued to reduce from 125 grams, which they reduced to 100 grams in 2010, 80 grams, 70 grams in 2017 and now is 65 grams. The price of the same product has nearly remained stagnant to Ksh100.
Other competitors such as Colgate, Wisdom, Sensodyne, Eezil, Whitedent, Dabur Herbal, Oral-B, and Miswa – all which have survived the competition without reducing the size or weighted. However, Pepsodent has devised the same system that Close-Up engage in.
Other manufacturers, which have also devised similar theories, include those manufacturing toilet papers. What they do is to make a big roll where they can only roll a few sheets.
In Kenya, whereas companies do device such ways to maintain consumers, not many consumers have realized the trick they use to keep them. The firms that use such tricks are local and international
Although many firms have (directly) increased their prices, others have engaged in the practice of product downsizing—decreasing the size or quantity of the product without changing its price.
Consumer lawyers say what happens to consumers is a deception. However, since most consumers have no clue of what they can do about such issues, they just leave themselves to fate.
Law firms in Kenya providing services to consumers say although in the realm of consumer goods, the adage ‘what you see is what you get’ does not always hold true, the tour to understand the true size of products that consumers use begins with decoding the labels, a task that can be as complex as it is crucial.
Ruby Njenga of A.B. Patel & Patel LLP acknowledges that consumers in Kenya have issues some of which they hardly tackle because they do not know. Njenga is, however, optimistic that as time continues, people become more aware about what happens around them – some of which violates their rights.
However, a representative of the Unilever Kenya, who did not wish mentioned, says reducing the weight and sizes of products is legal and practiced globally, so long as the weight and sizes mentioned are correct. The strategy is used the world over and cannot be viewed in any way as a siphon.
The Department of Weights and Measures that deals with issues related to underweight or overweight products in the country says the matter is a bit tricky because what many consumers are concerned with are items, which are weighed physically, and not those that are imported in the country.
Although consumers do not know if manufacturers are reducing the size of the products they use, what they require is the transparency of the product change and the presence of increases in the firm’s costs.
Several consumers in Kenya argue that whereas the vast majority of people judge price increases in response to cost increases as fair, this pattern is attenuated — or even reversed — for product downsizing, better known as shrinkflation.
Dan Mboya, a consumer in Nairobi, says the public reserves a right to be told if the size of the product they use have been reduced.
Across the world, shrinkflation as they call it is the practice done globally. It is the process of reducing the size or quantity of a product, while the price of the product remains the same or slightly increases. In some cases, the term may indicate lowering the quality of a product or its ingredients while the price remains the same.
It happens mostly to items or products that are sold fast. Shrinkflation is about the psychology of shopping, the economics of production, and the shifting sands of market trends.
Manufacturers and retailers have long employed strategies to adjust product sizes, sometimes subtly reducing quantities while maintaining prices, a practice known as shrinkflation.
This tactic can be a response to rising production costs or a strategic move to increase profit margins without the immediate backlash of a price hike.
