Completely off topic for this blog, but the current meme about Quality Street has hit a nerve. Well, the people screaming "wake up sheeple!" while not actually doing any research has hit a nerve.
The original post by Charlotte Stacey Hook has been picked up by news companies and retweeted/shared by far too many people. In this post I plan to show why the picture does not show that we are not getting short changed and the tins are not getting smaller. I am not defending Nestle here, but rather hoping that this will convince a few people to do a little research before screaming sheeple!
With no context this indeed looks like tins are getting smaller. But no reason for the selection of tins is given. They are not the largest available in any given year as you can currently buy a much larger 2.9kg tin and a mid sized 1.3kg tin. My suspicion is that either this was simply the size that Charlotte decided was correct at the time of purchase, or (if I'm feeling less forgiving) that they were selected in order to tell the story.
By carefully selecting tins we could create an image of tins getting bigger (and then blame Nestle for obesity), remaining the same or getting smaller.
So are we getting less chocolate for our money? In 1983 you could buy a 3lb (1.3kg) tub of Quality Street for £4.99. If we adjust the price to take into account inflation then we get a price between £13 and £25, which the "basic" calculation coming to just over £15. If we head to Amazon right now we can buy a 1.3kg tin of Quality Street for £15.75. So the price of Quality Street has not significantly changed.
One final thing to consider is that the price of cocoa has actually gone up. There is some truth in the whole "chocolates were bigger when I was a kid" as cocoa has become more expensive either the price increases or the size gets smaller.
To badly quote a friend of mine "memes tell you nothing about the subject matter and everything about the preconceptions of the person posting".
No comments:
Post a Comment