Cork Views: Shoppers are being taken for a sleigh-ride at the jingling tills

If you ask me, it’s time we all stood up and shouted STOP!

It was just one small, relatively inoffensive thing. But it was a flag-bearer, it was the writing on the wall; it was the canary in the mine shrieking about the way prices are sneaking up and sneaking up and sneaking up, carrying their shoes in their hands as they tiptoe ever so secretly upwards.

I was doing a bit of Christmas shopping in a retail chain. I wanted a few scented candles.

I recalled from last Christmas that this shop’s candles had nice, warm, subtle scents, lasted a good while, and were relatively reasonably priced, costing, as I seemed to recall, a tenner each.

So I was delighted to find the very same ginger-scented candle that I’d bought there last year, in the self-same plain brown cardboard box, and by the same maker; probably on the same shelf! Warm, fuzzy feelings all round. Until I looked at the price.

The ginger candle now costs €12.

Maybe I was wrong, I told myself. Maybe it hadn’t been a tenner last Christmas.

Surely the price of one unassuming scented candle hadn’t risen by 20% in the space of just one year? I must be confusing it with something else, I told myself, and they were still very nice candles so I bought two.

When I got home I went to put the candles away in the press where I keep my scented candles.

And right there - right at the very back of this little cupboard - what did I find but the same ginger candle made by the same manufacturer and packaged in the same plain brown cardboard box and bought from the same retail chain. Left over from last Christmas!

Only one thing was different; the price.

Printed on last year’s candle price sticker was €10.

Disbelievingly, I did my sums again. Yes, I was correct. A €2 rise on a €10 candle is an increase of 20%.

I googled. I looked up the Central Statistics Office and the Consumer Price Index. Last August, according to both of these highly reliable organisations, the price of inflation fell below 2% for the first time in more than three years.

By my reckoning, that ginger-scented candle should have cost €10.20.

Not €12.

But someone up there, either the manufacturer of the candle or the store itself, in their ivory towers, decided that a 2% rise just didn’t cut it for their profit margins.

So, because it’s just the digit two and all and - maybe assuming their customers wouldn’t know the difference - some clever clogs decided to move the decimal point on a bit further than was fair, and what should have been just under a 2% rise suddenly became a 20% rise.

Meaning huge profits for someone, and sure, the customers don’t notice the difference.

Don’t they now?

Either someone up there doesn’t know how to use a calculator properly, or we are being taken for a jingle-bell ride. Because if the shop are doing it with scented candles, they may well be unfairly shoving up the margin on everything else, and getting clear away with it.

But the thing is, lads, the people are noticing.

People are resentful. They know they’re being taken for a ride, no matter how many sleighbells you put a-jingling on the side of the Fools’ Wagon, no matter how many money-off vouchers or whatever that you print out for them with one hand, while you hike up your prices with the other.

I talked around about this, and I got loads of stories in return.

People complained about the reduced size of packets and boxes and containers, the reduced size of loaves of bread and cakes - for which they’re always expected to pay the same price.

Sometimes, they complained, products stay the same price but the item is smaller. Sometimes, the item stays the same size and the cost goes up, and sometimes the item is both smaller and more expensive.

It’s usually a lose-lose situation for shoppers.

Example: My father buys the same shaving cream every two months or so in his local supermarket. Always the same supermarket.

In the last month alone he has noticed that while his tin of shaving cream has remained the same shape, colour and price, the amount of actual shaving cream it contains has very quietly dropped from 250ml to 200ml.

Example: Someone else reported the changes they’ve noticed at a bakery. The price per loaf is the same, but this regular, loyal, but suspicious customer noticed that the weight of them had changed. And yes, the very canny customer went off and proved it - by weighing the bread.

This ‘smaller for the same price’ trend, he informed me, is a strategy known in the retail sector as ‘shrinkage’, which means appearing not to put up your prices, all the while quietly reducing the amount your customer gets.

And happy Christmas to you too.