As we shop for groceries we know how Alice felt when she said, “It was much pleasanter at home, when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller.”
We’re not the ones growing larger and smaller in the grocery store, it’s the products. They’re all like Alice, getting larger or smaller, based on the imagination of the food industry. If they imagine they can make more money by going larger or smaller, they do it, just like that.
Dreyer’s ice cream just recently went smaller again, as the former half gallon container miraculously became 1.5 quarts. Apparently there was a 1.75 quart interlude that Alice missed. Dreyer’s felt so guilty about the drop to 1.5 quarts that the company launched a massive sale to hide the downsizing. Last week you could buy 1.5 quarts for the remarkable price of 1.5 quarts, before it goes back to the normal price of 1.5 quarts for the price of two quarts.
Besides the price gouging, Alice must protest the decimalizing of the English system of measurements. There is no such thing as 1.5 quarts. What Dreyer’s is offering is three pints. At least show some respect for tradition when raising prices by shrinking containers.
We all know that cereal boxes have met a similar fate. Tall, fat, boxes became skinnier, and now the former tall boxes are shorter and even thinner. Two pounds became one pound, which is now down to 14.5 ounces.
Elsewhere in the store, Alice and other shoppers get less of everything for the same price.
The exception is the produce section, where items are growing larger. Grocers are compelling farmers to breed everything bigger that is sold by the pound.
Apples may be on “sale” for $1.29 a pound, but the catch is that a single apple weighs one pound. Four apples cost more than $5, thanks to the gargantuan propagation of the species.
Some bananas are approaching two feet in length and they’re still growing. Eventually we’ll see banana trucks on the highway, like the logging trucks of the old days. One truck will haul a dozen bananas, each of which weights half a ton. At 89 cents a pound, a banana will cost $890. On the plus side, if Alice slices open the top and carefully scrapes out the contents, she’s got herself a banana boat that will carry a dozen passengers through Wonderland.
Poor Alice walks out of the grocery store only to see that all the cars on the road are growing smaller, due to high gas prices. She’d like to buy one herself but the prices don’t reflect their size. So she goes home and tries to relax, only to discover that her bank account is growing smaller and her monthly bills are growing larger.
Alice takes some comfort in thinking this all could be a dream.
