Ticky tacky

My local Safeway has a bakery which regularly turns out delicious cookies and pastries and breads and rolls and so forth. For years part of Mom’s everyday lunch has been two of its bakers’ oatmeal raisin cookies. They’re great.

They are packaged in a big square plastic tray with a clear lid similar to this. They used to be $7 for 50 cookies. A month or two ago I noticed the price stayed at $7, but the quantity dropped to 45 cookies. “Well,” I thought, “the cost of flour and raisins must have gone up some.”

Today I went to get more and found that they’ve dropped the price by a penny to $6.99 but they’ve dropped the quantity to 39 cookies. “This is getting annoying,” I thought.

The cashier whose register I walked up to happened to be the Front End Manager of the store, so I mentioned this to him. He wasn’t exactly appalled, but he was surprised. I don’t expect anything to change, but I let him know not all his customers just blithely accepted this kind of thing without noticing it.

We consumers have been seeing this for years in the coffee containers and the cereal boxes which come from the big food processors. It’s a little more discouraging to see it done by your local baker.