The body kit of buyers in stores intends to control the prosecutor’s office

Anyone in Russia can offend a buyer. Even in large retail chains, one cannot relax especially. Instead of a liter of milk, the buyer can slip 900 grams, and in a pack of cottage cheese there may be not half a kilo, but only 450 grams … Soon such “marketing” will come to an end. The Prosecutor General’s Office itself advocates the creation of a single and indivisible GOST for packaging for products, which does not give sellers any chance to leave any customer with a nose.

Reducing the product in the package while maintaining its previous price is practiced not only in Russia. It even got a special market term – “shrinkflation”. In other words, manufacturers who do not report or add something come from the best of intentions. Say, people may not even notice that in a liter package of apple juice it turned out to be 50 grams less. But if a liter of a drink rises in price by 20 rubles, this will begin here … You need to take care of the buyer, nerve cells are not restored! In a word, underfilling and lack of sleep in theory is aimed at the benefit of the buyer.

Shrinkflation in Russia began to be actively mastered by manufacturers in the crisis years of 2008-09, when, accompanying the global economic crisis, difficult times came to our country. According to the Institute for the Development of Entrepreneurship and Economics, the industry has reduced the volume of packaging and packaging by 7-20%. Therefore, you should no longer be surprised at plastic bottles with a volume of 0.8–0.9 liters – only a trained “eye of a hunter” can appreciate that the container has “lost weight”. Or a stick of butter. Once upon a time, not in this life, there was a standard – 250 grams, today you can meet 170-180 grams. Most likely, in the struggle to increase the purchasing power of citizens, sellers were reduced to indecent volumes – there is nowhere else to go. At the same time, food prices are still growing, although they are not reported or topped up.

In the reduction of packaging and containers, the deputy chairman of the board of the Rusprodsoyuz association, Dmitry Leonov, sees, among other things, a fairly new trend in the urbanization of society. “The times when our population was packed with bags and buckets are long gone,” he says. — Customers go to the store more often and buy less, for example for lunch and dinner. That’s enough.”

However, according to the results of the VTsIOM survey, more than half of the population, 60%, are dissatisfied with such experiments with packages. Which mask the rise in price of goods. And the Russians prefer the harsh truth than sweet lies.

In general, now the whole world, under the vigilant eye of the Prosecutor General’s Office, will have to do so as not to mislead the buyer. This position is supported by the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The Office advocates that container sizes be rounded to exact values. And he is already working on the issue with the authorities and business.

“The initiative is positive, the supervisory authority is not indifferent to the situation in the consumer market and the rights of buyers,” says Alexander Brazhko, coordinator of the federal project “For Honest Products”. – This is a signal to federal retail chains that order non-standard packaging “for themselves” so that consumer demand does not decrease. We will not see the effect immediately, but after 3-4 years. But at some point you have to start.”

In other words, there should not be any non-standard containers. It is necessary to return to the previous liter and kilogram, as it was 15-20 years ago: for cereals, and for milk, and for cottage cheese.

– And if not? Will the industry be unable to quickly reorganize to a new-old container?

– On the label, huge flashy numbers should sparkle: for example, 930 grams, 970 and so on. These figures must occupy at least half of the label area. Then the consumer will not turn into researchers who study packaging every day in anticipation of deception. I think that such containers will quickly disappear from the retail shelves.

– Many believe that the food workers are to blame for everything, they do not report and do not top up …

– Retail orders packaging, all other partners adjust to it. Manufacturers themselves, among other things, save on containers and packaging. For example, plastic bottles of mineral water are produced in a lightweight version, if they are not 100% filled, then they bend in the hands. The caps on the bottles have also become smaller in diameter. Nobody is against the release of new products, but it should not be at the expense of the buyer.

– Probably, in order to speed up the process of unification of standards, it is necessary to introduce a norm of responsibility? What?

– Nothing will work. Today, there are enough measures of responsibility in the legislation, but all of them are not effective. Consumers should be able to sue…

“But he has the right to file a lawsuit today!”

– And in the best case, he will win from the trade, which sold the goods to him not in full, 100 rubles. Who will sue for 100 rubles? Nobody. Therefore, we are all silent, supposedly everything suits us. But if the minimum fine was 100 thousand rubles, the courts would be overwhelmed with lawsuits. Not everyone would be able to recover such amounts from trade. But believe that we would quickly switch to our traditional measure of weights and volumes.