Ice Cream Economics

Gas isn't the only thing going up in price. I was in the grocery store tonight, and I confirmed a trend I've been noticing recently. Ice cream containers are getting smaller. It used to be that you could get a half gallon of ice cream, a full two quarts. A few years ago, they scaled back to less than that, one-and-three-quarters (or 1.75 for all the numeracists in the readership). I didn't notice the actual transition, so I can't say precisely how long they stayed at that level. But they're now going down to cartons that are only one-and-a-half quarts in size. I've been noticing it in Edy's (which is called Dreyer's on the west coast) special limited edition flavors, but tonight I saw that the regular flavors are shrinking, too. It's actually not hard to catch. Edy's packages its ice cream in thick tubes, so they don't have many options in how to hide the shrinking volume. Perhaps valiantly, they seem to have taken the hit in the height. The one-and-a-half quart cartons are simply about three-quarters of an inch shorter. It's recognizable on its own, but if the new size is packaged next to the old size (and I saw a fair amount of that tonight), there's no way you can fail to notice the difference. I also checked to see what was up with Breyer's, and they're doing the same thing. Breyer's cartons are more rectangular, and so they've got a bit more ability to hide the loss of volume. If you look at the carton straight on, there's not really much to notice. But turn the carton to the side, and its considerably thinner from front to back. When it comes down to it, I guess you just can't hide a shrinkage of 15 percent or so. And like Edy's, there were more one-and-a-half quart packages than one-and-three-quarter quarts. Within a month, I predict, the one-and-three-quarter size will have been phased out altogether.

Oh, and no, they're not dropping the price to match the new size. What are you, crazy?