Pssst — you there, in marketing at the food company. You’re not fooling us. We’ve noticed, and we’re not happy with ever-shrinking sizes for the same price.

A new round of an old corporate game is under way. When costs go up, say for grain or gas to transport their product, or when profits stagnate, companies can either raise prices or give consumers less for their money and hope they keep buying.

It’s a hidden side of an inflation in the price of food that’s been particularly brutal lately. That inflation falls most heavily on the people who spend the biggest percentage of their income on food — the poor.

Recently, Kraft stopped making rectangular Nabisco Premium saltines, which it sold in a onepound box for roughly $2.49. The company switched to round saltines, which it packages in vertical boxes that contain 10.5 ounces of crackers. The price on the box stayed the same, but a consumer who didn’t switch brands was stuck paying nearly one-third more for crackers.

Consumers usually don’t have that choice with most products. As soon as one company shrinks its package, or sneakily begins putting less product in the same size package, others quickly follow suit.

Try to find a once-standard 6- ounce can of tuna fish on the shelves. They’re all 5 ounces now.

It’s the same for orange juice: The standard half-gallon carton now holds 59 ounces. Sugar now comes in 4-pound, not 5-pound, bags. One-pound cans of fruit and vegetables have disappeared, replaced by cans containing ounces less for the same price.

The trend is accelerating to the point where soon it will take two cans of tuna fish to make a sandwich.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to food. There are fewer sheets of paper towels on rolls and, while there may be just as many sheets on a roll of toilet paper, the sheets continue to shrink in both length and width. Despite the increasing size of the average American, the old 4 1/2- by-4 1/2-inch sheet is now just 4.1 inches wide by 3.7 inches long.

Because the federal Consumer Price Index does not include the cost of food and fuel, its core inflation figure has always been a fiction. There’s nothing more “core” to a household inflation rate than the cost of groceries, gas for the car and fuel for the furnace.

The federal government isn’t honest about inflation, and neither are the companies that, seemingly simultaneously, decide to give their customers less for the same price.

The inflation rate for food and other products consumed every day is not the CPI’s 3.1 percent but 8 percent, and that’s made for long faces in the supermarket aisles.

— The Concord (N.H.) Monitor

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