My favorite coffee recently has been the specialty coffee brand from Olympic. Up to last week or so the coffee package had 200g for about 960 yen for beans like Kilimanjaro, Guatemala, Columbia, Brazil, Ethiopia. The “new” products are interesting in that they have doubled the options for light or dark on top of whole bean or ground, so 4 options of the same coffees with a catch: 25% less coffee (150g) in the bags!
I hate seeing this trend but I think that Olympic is just late as this similar shrinkflation happened with the Don Quixote coffees almost exactly 1 year ago, and many services and products had already raised prices during this year.
7 comments
they are just trying to survive, or just make more money
Welcome to the new normal. (Yeah, I hate it too)
Coffee prices are up worldwide because of declining bean production as a result of global warming. There is a specialty coffee shop in Kokubu that sells quality coffee beans online from their own sources. They used to be my go-to place to buy coffee beans until their prices went past ¥4,000 for 1kg of their lowest grade beans. These days Costco is the cheapest place to buy quality coffee beans.
Not just coffee, my favorite cereal Nissin ごろグラ went from 400g bags to 360g one day but the price stayed the same. Sucks, so I only buy it when it’s on sale now and stockpile it when I do.
My mom in the states always complains that she has to adjust many of her old recipes. They all contain things like a 12 ounce can of whatever, but now those cans only contain like 10 1/2 ounces
For imported goods, price increases are difficult to avoid with the JPY taking such a nosedive in value. Still very frustrating to see.
My wife recently complained that her Muji skincare toner had shrunk by a substantial amount as well.
As for coffee, I usually buy at Jupiter or Kaldi when they have one of their 50% off days. Or if I’m going fancy I’ll use caferrant (aeon?) for their point program.