Well good, fuck ‘em. Pepsi I mean. I had a gf who was obsessed with Diet Pepsi and the price has over doubled in the past few years. In 2020, you could easily find 2 liter bottles for $0.99, $1.25. Then they went to $1.75… $2.49… $2.99. You can still find them on sale 3 for $5, not not often or all the time. I’m pretty sure that the cost of bringing Diet Pepsi to market has not increased 300%.
About a year ago I was at a grocery store and bought one of those 473ml bottles of pop at the till. It rang up on the till as $2.99
I told them to remove that, it’s ridiculous, went to the pop section, and got the exact same 2L pop on sale for $1
Oh yeah, small bottles in convenience sizes are absurd. Same for water. You can buy 1/2 a quart for $2.00 or an entire gallon for $1.50.
Or turn the handle on your faucet for $0.00
Well, technically you do pay for tap water, but sure, it’s like 2 cents. I use bottled water when I’m camping or otherwise away from my faucet.
I pay something like $5 per 10,000 gallons, so for me a bottle of water definitely rounds down to $0.00.
Those mini-cans of soda are more expensive too. So nuts.
Are there extra taxes on sugarly drinks in EU countries?
It seems they do in individual countries but not EU-wide. Not very much though, it says an average of 7.5 cents a can.
So, that can not explain rise of the price then…
Sugary drink taxes don’t apply to diet sodas either
Depends on location. In parts of the US like Philadelphia and DC diet sodas absolutely are included in the tax. Meanwhile in Seattle Starbucks beverages were specifically excluded as not being “sugary” because they include milk which makes them “healthy” thanks to a lot of lobbying. I don’t know of any European taxes that function the same way but it has certainly tainted the concept since, like everything, shitty lawmaking ruined the entire point in actual execution.
Yeah where I was living in Seattle diet sodas were exempt from the tax. I do recall that Starbucks thing but that’s a whole other issue.
I live in an EU country now and apparently they’re gonna be rolling out sugary drink taxes soon and I’m not yet clear on whether diet sodas are included but I haven’t looked into it closely yet.
I was living in the Seattle area when they implemented theirs and that is when I looked into the taxes and found out about Philly including diet soda. I can’t find a source now with quick googling but the reason I came across back then was that statistically white middle class consumers drink more diet soda so zero calorie drinks were included in the “sugary” tax to promote equity… while completely destroying the health push that was the very reason for the tax.
Meanwhile diet or not I just wish I could get Mezzo Mix at my local store.
I wonder if they will do that with wine as well.
They would probably keep the same cost for diet and non-diet Pepsi and pocket the difference.
Honestly wouldn’t surprise me
Where I’ve seen such a tax implemented that was not the case. But sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened somewhere.
So you’re talking about 14p difference on a large soda.
The bottled stuff, it depends, a lot of it got reduced way the fuck down to limit it or fall under the limit entirely. Honestly, it was a good thing. I genuinely can’t stand full sugar soda … makes my teeth itch.
Pepsi owns Frito-Lay, so I wonder what else is going on behind the scenes? And did Carrefour also drop Quaker Oats?
It’s two big conglomerates battling over money. This doesn’t benefit consumers, it benefits the two giants.
If Carrefour gets a good deal by using it’s shear scale, it will compete with smaller retailers who can’t force a better deal. If it’s doing this to Pepsi, imagine what it does to smaller business and farmers etc.
If Pepsi gets their price rise it’ll increase its profits.
If they compromise halfway, consumers will ultimately still lose out.
It pushes own brand which has much better margin.
How aren’t lower prices a benefit for consumers in principle? (Leaving aside specific questions about health and that Pepsi is overpriced anyway.)
And did Carrefour also drop Quaker Oats?
Yes. As well as Lipton, 7Up, Doritos…
Came here to say this. That said, they own a lot of other things too, so there’s something funky happening.
I’m confused about why you guys think this is “funky” or something else is happening. FritoLay/Pepsi hiked prices on certain products, Carrefour wasn’t happy about not being able to negotiate a different price point and they decided to hit back by discontinuing those products and very publicly adding PR signs blaming Pepsi for increasing prices to flex their muscle.
This is very unusual, but not that confusing. Inflation being caused by corporations rising prices unnecessarily has been a common narrative, large supermarkets have been blamed for it, especially when it comes to products like fruit and vegetables. Carrefour wants to make sure the manufacturer gets blamed instead of them. It helps that they have a very, very robust set of store brands, too.
What’s a Quaker Oats? I guess they dropped it 1958 when they first opened, along with everybody else.
(Kidding, kinda, I have heard the name, but I couldn’t tell you what you get inside a box or what you do with it. Eat it, presumably, but I don’t know how).
It is an American brand of oatmeal. You cook them to make a porridge.
They also make cereals (Capn Crunch), snack bars, Rice-a-roni, Tropicana, etc.
We don’t have Cap’n Crunch either. And I don’t know what Rice-a-roni is. If Tropicana is juice we do get that. Pepsi drinks are a thing worldwide.
As for porridge, the only reason I’ve ever seen it is I know people with medical issues.
I don’t understand what is upsetting in your comment for some.
Some heavily processed foodstuffs are unique to the US and doesn’t sell anywhere else, to the point as someone who has lived in a bunch of countries across Europe, I have no idea what a rice-a-roni is either. I imagine every country has its own food types not many other countries sell. I would be surprised if French cuisine stopped at croissants as well.
Maybe people don’t like pointing it out that US culture is not the default across the world and people have different cultural lenses with which they view the world?
I don’t know, man. I mean, I know about that last part, that is definitely a thing. I don’t know if that’s it or if the perception here is different or what. I wasn’t even trolling, I’m mildly curious about Rice-a-roni now. Just mildly enough not to google it. Maybe the Carrefour versus Pepsi thing reads as a Europe vs the US thing? I hadn’t even considered that until just now and it seems hilarious.
For the record, we obviously get a ton of cereal, including very sugary cereal. You can get those pillowy things with nutella inside them, which are less cereal and more a way to pretend you’re having breakfast when you’re really just inhaling a full box of chocolate cookies.
Oats are the main ingredient in muesli and granola. And there’s also a milk substitute made out of them. Avoine if you speak french.
Good, their products will rot your body and teeth. Then they just raise prices for no reason? Fuck them and stop stocking their products.
Don’t worry, their competitor product, that would be chosen over them anyway because of the price, will also rot your body and teeth all nice.
Now lets do this in USA.
How can that be profitable for Frito-Lay?
It’s not. They fucked up.
They’re both the bottom barrel of junk food.
It‘s worth noting that this has been going on for quite a while now in Europe. Two of Germany‘s largest retailers, Edeka and Rewe, don‘t stock products from quite a few companies like Mars, PepsiCo and Procter&Gamble anymore. Edeka even went to court with Coca-Cola because of their ludicrous price increases in 2022.
And both retailers haven’t shied away from making these issues very public. They‘ve often put signs into the empty shelves explaining the situation in detail.
They are obviously more afraid of having to explain those massive price hikes to customers, than they are of not stocking these products at all. Which, seeing how little the manufacturing costs actually increased while profits for the manufacturers surged, is definitely a good thing for consumers.
