In addition to hiking prices and shrinking product sizes, some food companies have also been quietly downgrading ingredients to reduce manufacturing costs in a process known as ‘skimpflation.’
In addition to hiking prices and shrinking product sizes, some food companies have also been quietly downgrading ingredients to reduce manufacturing costs in a process known as ‘skimpflation.’
Right. Writing it as they did makes it seem that the food companies are doing this out of necessity, like they’re barely getting by. They’re doing this because they’re evil, greedy, fucks.
More insidiously, it could also be read in a way that makes these companies look like heroes. “We’re reducing costs to keep food prices low.” type BS.
It could be true that middlemen are doing the profit-taking. Like, Amazon produces nothing, but takes a huge cut. So to see any profit, the producers reduce quality, quantity, etc. Of course, Amazon just tightens the screws and takes whatever profit they do eke out.
It’s disingenuous to say that Amazon produces nothing. They produce the environment that allows everyone to sell their products on the largest marketplace that has ever existed. They produce the servers, the hosting, the DNS, the security, the credit card processing, the shipping setup, and so much more. Plus they do produce actual products too. There’s a lot of criticism that could be levied against Amazon, but not producing anything valuable isn’t one of those criticisms.
Yes, all that is true, but there are also instances in which they are the middleman taking a cut out of proportion to their value add. It was just one example out of many.