The man chasing disguised price increases – 04/26/2023 – Market

A few weeks ago, Edgar Dworsky received a promising tip via email. “Diluted cough syrup,” read the message, accompanied by a photo of two packages of the product with a curious difference: one of them, newer, appeared to be half as potent as the old one.

Dworsky receives these emails frequently, alerting him to things like a bag of dog food that has discreetly shrunk from 22 kg to 20 kg, a box of cereal that has changed from “giant” to “family” size and has grown by about 2 .5 cm in height, but lost a few tens of grams.

The cough syrup message sounded intriguing. Dworsky made plans to investigate.

He has devoted much of his life to exposing one of the sneakiest tricks of the modern consumer economy: “downsizing,” when products or packaging are subtly manipulated so that people pay the same price, or even slightly more, without knowing that are purchasing a smaller volume of the product.

Dworsky has investigated this type of strategy for decades and describes his findings on his website, mouseprint.org, a reference to the fine print on product packaging. The print is so small that “just a mouse [mouse, em inglês] could read,” he says.

He writes about downsizing in everything — tuna, mayonnaise, ice cream, deodorant, detergent — alongside other consumer advocacy work on issues like false advertising and class action.

A recent report by Mouse Print explored toilet paper shrinkage. “Virtually every brand has shrunk over the years,” Dworsky wrote, documenting more than a decade of product shrinkage.

The 71-year-old lawyer began his career as a market researcher, before working for a short time as a reporter for local television. At the height of his career, Dworsky worked with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office.

His boss at the time, Robert Sherman, recalled Dworsky walking into his office in the early 1990s with two bottles of deodorant. “What do you see?” he remembers Dworsky asking.

Sherman thought the two were exactly alike. But not. “This one has more than the other, the difference is the size of the lid”, he replied.

It was only now, however, that Dworsky saw his work truly appreciated. With US inflation at the highest level in 40 years, brands have been reducing their products to try to hide the price increases.

Companies are doing this out of necessity, says Krishnakumar Davey of market research consultancy IRI. “Manufacturers are facing huge costs,” he said, referring to prices for raw materials, labor and freight. “They try to figure out how to balance that.”

Dworsky works seven days a week from his modest three-bedroom apartment, where he lives alone. He made less than $7,000 last year, mostly from donations and advertising revenue, and survives on a pension, a state pension and his savings.

“I preach what I practice. Spending is a word that is not in my vocabulary. People go hunting ducks or deer. I hunt bargains!”, he jokes about his financial situation.

With inflation shaking the US, the shrinkage of products caught the attention of John Oliver, who runs the Last Week Tonight (HBO) program. Dworsky’s peculiar presence on TV did not go unnoticed by the presenter.

“The media love to cover this, often with the help of what appears to be the only expert on the subject,” Oliver said.

Dworsky’s work has also received attention in academic circles. Joseph Balagtas, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University who has studied the downsizing, said Dworsky is the only person he knows of who has documented the phenomenon.

Other examples Dworsky noted recently include Dawn dishwashing soap, which lost 15 grams in one of its bottles, and Smart Balance cream, which was reformulated with less vegetable oil. Procter & Gamble, which makes Dawn, did not respond to requests for comment. The maker of Smart Balance said the company has modified some products “to make them easier to spread” but would go back to the previous formula based on consumer feedback.

Dworsky fears that consumer advocacy is a decadent profession, and he is frustrated by the difficulty of finding such examples. “There’s almost a resignation that they’re very hard to find,” he said. “It takes someone with eagle eyes.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves