The wife took pity on my sweet-tooth addiction last week and bought some Oreo cookies.

I sensed their presence hidden in the cupboard the minute I entered the kitchen.
I have this gift.

It’s been a while since I looked at one closely.

The white stuff has shrunk.
A lot.

This is what the Oreo looked like before I ate it.

The filling is the reason I like Oreos in the first place.
There’s hardly any.

There’s certainly not enough left for me to want to buy them again.

If you can’t pull them apart and lick the stuff – why bother?

I’m not saying this is the case here, but making things smaller is the latest great idea from most companies.

Here’s the logic, as I have heard it:

It’s costing more to make stuff, like cookies.

So, what they do is make things a bit smaller, or put less in the package, so they don’t have to raise the price.

Supposedly the idea is we won’t want to pay a 50-cents increase for a dozen pieces of something, but we’re willing to pay the same old price for only ten pieces.

How messed up is that?

Sure, salaries and benefit costs go up.
Raw material is more expensive.

Things are going to go up.

My mother bought a new Chevy when I was a kid for $5,000.

I bought a new Jeep last year for $32,000.

No one was selling a $5,000 car with only 3 wheels, no seats and a rubber-band motor to keep the price the same.

If Oreo, or anyone, is going to make a product worse in order to keep its customers, they’re like a dog sniffing at the wrong hydrant.

When any product is no longer what we thought we were buying then we stop buying and go elsewhere.

That’s the logic they should be looking at.