The other day, I found myself wanting to say, "If it's all sale, can you pick up a pound of bacon?"
It's sad that "if it's on sale" has become a prerequisite to considering purchasing anything these days, particularly food. And it's amazing how quickly we become conditioned to paying the new prices.
I got excited the other day about seeing bacon for $4.99 completely forgetting that just a few short years ago, the regular price was significantly less than the sale price is now.
The other interesting thing about the above phrase is that I still want to call the standard package size for bacon a pound.
As long as I can remember, bacon has come in those vacuum-sealed, shingle-packed packages with the little window on the back so you can see what you're getting vis-a-vis fat versus lean meat. For decades, the standard size of that package was a pound.
After Canada switched to the metric system, it became 454 grams, but Canadians have been nothing if not stubborn about relinquishing some of the vestiges of the imperial system. We were conditioned to calling it a pound so a pound it remained.
By the way, that little window on your bacon is not voluntary on the part of bacon producers. Laws in Canada and the United States require producers to provide a view of at least 70 per cent of a representative slice.
The COVID-19 pandemic saw the term shrinkflation come into the vernacular. This is the practice of reducing the amount of product in a package rather than raising the price.
But shrinkflation in bacon came long before the pandemic.
In 2014, limited supply, rising feed costs and an outbreak of porcine epidemic diarrhea across North America's hog industry sent pork prices soaring. Rather than jack up the price of bacon, however, producers reduced the amount in the standard package to 375 grams.
While shrinkflation as a term was only coined in 2009 by British economist Pippa Malmgren the practice, not surprisingly, in ancient.
In the 1700s, it was considered unethical to raise the price of bread. It was believed there was a fair and moral price for bread as opposed to one dictated by market forces.
Of course, that didn't mean market forces didn't exist and in times of grain shortages, bakers faced a conundrum as raising prices could ignite bread riots.
They made smaller loaves.