About a year and a half ago, I started shopping at Trader Joe’s. When my daughter and her family were here during the summer, we went over to a strip mall to sign up for a family phone plan that my grandson and I could be in. He was going to attend college in the United States.
Trader Joe’s was next to the phone store.
It was an improvement at Trader Joe’s to see that not everything was wrapped in plastic. When I did a price comparison several years ago, I decided I wouldn’t shop there due to the wide use of plastic on produce.
In my shopping, I found that Trader Joe’s had lower prices on many items than I was buying at my local co-op. Among the better deals were paper products. I started buying toilet paper and paper towels there.
At the co-op, I’d been ordering a case of toilet paper for years. It was one of the only places I could get it made from post-consumer content paper. The toilet paper cost about a $1 a roll.
Last week when I opened a package of Trader Joe’s paper towels, I was expecting to see the usual large, fluffy ones I’d purchased before, like the ones in the back row in the photo.
Instead, there were three skinny paper towel rolls in the package, the ones in the front row in the photo. I couldn’t believe that Trader Joe’s would shrink them that much, that it would be easily visible from one purchase to the next.
Of course, the price is the same – $3.99 for three rolls.
The new packaging calls the paper towels “Trader Joe’s Slim Size Paper Towels.” It says the towels are 189.06 square feet. Unfortunately, I didn’t save the previous package to see how much the square footage has been decreased.
I called Trader Joe’s to see if it sells two sizes of paper towels. The answer was no, it only sells one size of paper towels.
It’s disappointing that Trader Joe’s is using shrinkflation like big corporations.
Check Mouse Print, the sister website of Consumer World, a public service consumer resource guide, for updates on shrinkflation, a sneaky way for manufacturers to pass on hidden price increases.
Update: When I went to Trader Joe's Thursday, a customer service representative looked up the previous size of the paper towels. It was 4.2 square feet more per roll or 12.6 square feet more per package of three.
