When did they ruin breakfast junk food?

[Casual Observer]

I haven't bought pop tarts in about 20 years so imagine my surprise when I opened the package and saw how fucking small they have become. They're at least a half inch shorter each direction and the icing barely covers the middle and is nowhere near consistent. Then I opened my first box of Honey Nut Cheerios in a couple of decades and found they have completely ruined it. Honey Nut Cheerios used to be bumpy, you could feel the honey nut flavoring on the outside of the cheerio. Now, there's just a slight honey nut flavor in what appears to be a regular cheerio.

I feel sorry for kids growing up nowadays, their Sat. morning cartoons are garbage and now their junk food is as well.

[AArdvark]

Man, I haven't even walked down a breakfast cereal aisle in years. Except for the Monster cereals showing up every October I wouldn't even know they existed anymore. Kinda sad in a way. Get old enough to buy any junk food you could ever want and just don't care about it anymore. I blame beer

[Jizaboz]

I thought maybe I noticed a change with Honey Nut Cheerios over the years.

One kid cereal I recall being COMPLETELY ruined was "Trix". They went from spheres to fruit shapes with a new horrible flavor. I think now it's spheres again, but it probably tastes and smells weird.

Count Chocula is still good, but it used to be better. The actual cereal part became "puffier" and the taste changed slightly. Maybe less sugar/cocoa.

[Tdarcos]

I haven't bought pop tarts in about 20 years so imagine my surprise when I opened the package and saw how fucking small they have become. They're at least a half inch shorter each direction and the icing barely covers the middle and is nowhere near consistent.

They've also cut the amount of fruit filling inside. I can taste the difference.

It's called a "stealth price increase." Instead of raising the price when costs go up due to increased expenses, if it is believed that customers are very price sensitive, or they know competitors will do the same thing, they'll reduce the size or volume. or cheapen the product, or both. Reducing size or weight only works for so long, until you can't reduce the size any further or there will be nothing left, (or you get busted for fraud). Eventually the price has to increase, but now it's a price increase on the now reduced size product.

Now the fraud part. Safeway sold cherry pies in snack size, similar to Hostess pies. As manufacturing costs went up, they switched from a strawberry fruit-based filling to an artificial cherry-flavored filling. The FTC caught them and imposed a fine because they later substituted grapes for cherries in their "cherry" pie. There wasn't so much as a gram of actual cherry in their "cherry pies."

[Tdarcos]

In the preceding message is the sentence, "As manufacturing costs went up, they switched from a strawberry fruit-based filling to an artificial cherry-flavored filling."

It should read, "As manufacturing costs went up, they switched from a cherry fruit-based filling to an artificial cherry-flavored filling."