When I started this site I didn’t intend to make a consumer watch guide. I don’t think I have to worry about it becoming one but since I was doing laundry last night this little topic is near and dear to my heart.

What does my laundry have to do with Consumer Reports and anything else in particular?

Well I ran out of detergent last night. No big deal, I had another box on hand. So I rip it open and fish out the handy little measuring cup they include on the inside. Something looked a bit fishy, so I placed the new measuring cup next to the old one. Take a look at the pictures below and you tell me what’s different. The new cup is on the left.

One more showing the old cup nested in the new one. I find it particularly interesting that the 1- line on the new cup ends where the -2 line ends on the old one.

A little semi-scientific measuring in the the kitchen laboratory here shows that the old cup specs out at 125ml at the top of the 1 line, and the new cup 150ml.

What’s going on here? Looks like the nice people at Proctor and Gamble are trying to get me to use laundry detergent even faster. Of course it could also be that they’ve chocked the new box with filler so that I need to use more just to get my clothes clean.

What’s up with this? It seems companies all over have decided that they can’t charge us more for the same products, so instead they’re giving us less for the same price.

Lovely. Ain’t capitalism grand? It’s a slow and steady process, this errosion of consumer value. Lucky for the corporations, I don’t think most people realize it’s even going on. We buy the same products in the same containers and don’t even look to see that they now contain half an ounce less. After all what’s half an ounce?

It may not seem like much to the average consumer, but to the corporations half an ounce multiplied by hundreds of thousands of containers adds up to a significant amount of money. Sheer profit. The only thing that bothers me, that profit comes at the expense of consumer value.

In an age where executive salaries, bonuses and perks total in the millions, I have to wonder why they have to remove value from the consumer. Are they in such diar straights that they’ll go under if they don’t do it? Will hundred of jobs be lost if they don’t?

I can’t help but think that there’s something wrong here. Not with the laundry detergent specifically, but with the state of capitalism in general. The persuit of ever higher profits is becoming unsustainable. Do I have proof of this? Nope, it’s just a feeling. Well that and I don’t like feeling that someone is trying to pull a fast one on me.

So when is the correction comming? I don’t know. Things will probably have to get a lot worse to make people notice, and they’ve been very careful to make the adjustments slowly in small increments.

I can’t help but wonder if they’d be doing this if they didn’t have extravegant executive privilages. What makes someone think they deserve what they’re getting? I don’t know the answer to that, and it’s a rant for another time.