Article mentions nothing with regards to holding corporations accountable nor any plan or threat of action on the president’s part.
These kinds of comments frustrate me… They fundamentally conflate the presidency with a more king-like position.
The system is setup against him doing anything other than speaking out about the issue and trying to motivate others to do something about it. The president ultimately has little power … it’s more of a oversight/cheer leading position (with some extended powers over the years to deal with imminent issues – e.g., authorize short term military operations, which is still scary in the wrong hands) while congress is the office workers that are supposed to actually get the law writing done.
Unfortunately, we’ve had roughly a decade of Republican lead stagnation due to slim majority Democrat representation or outright majority Republican representation – the Republican platform is after all the “do nothing because more government is bad” platform.
He’s doing exactly what he should be doing, using the office to call people out and bring attention to issues/start conversations. That can result in brands either going “… lets make a voluntary change to get the heat off” or the public going “yeah that’s a good point calls congressional rep to complain.”
What are you suggesting he do about it?
edit for the knee-jerk downvoters: Everything the government is authorized to do is codified in federal statute, including agency powers. If Congress doesn’t give an agency the power to regulate the size and shape of a peanut butter cup, the agency cannot regulate the size and shape of a peanut butter cup, full stop. The reason the President isn’t proposing a fix to this is that Congress hasn’t given anyone the authority to fix this problem. The FDA can sorta kinda regulate slack fill (i.e. the empty space in your bag of chips) but only if it’s non-functional or deceptive. Shrinkflation is quite legal, so long as the size/weight of the product is clearly labeled. If companies get away with it, that’s because we’re stupid, clueless consumers who never read labels. And they will continue to do it until a) we stop buying their product, or b) Congress passes a law to make it illegal. Unless that happens, we’re stuck with it because the President is not an all powerful god who can will things into existence.
Once again, civic literacy in this county proves profoundly lacking.
Make it expensive to change the weight of a product. Standardize the size and weight of a given type of product. Require the packaging to alert consumers that the weight have changed in the last year and how much it has changed. Tie the trademark of a given product to a certain weight.
Are these good ideas? I don’t know, I literally made them up just now while shitting. I am sure the president of the United States could hire at least one dude to come up with better ones.
Make it expensive to change the weight of a product.
The President literally can’t do that.
Standardize the size and weight of a given type of product.
The President can’t do that. Not sure the FDA can even do that, as just about all they can weigh in on is product safety (i.e. “does not contain more than X of any harmful substance”) and categorical definitions (i.e. “ice cream must meet this definition”). They can’t say, “all M&Ms must be this big and weigh this much”.
Require the packaging to alert consumers that the weight have changed in the last year and how much it has changed.
Neither the President nor the FDA can do that. The FDA doesn’t have the regulatory power to do anything even close to that.
Tie the trademark of a given product to a certain weight.
That’s…not how trademarks work, at all.
Look man, it’s as frustrating to me as it is to anyone, but y’all can’t just make up a bunch of fanciful, largely illegal remedies to the problem and then lay the blame for their impossibility on the President’s desk. That’s just ridiculous.
All great ideas if it weren’t for the fact that we have a court system heavily weighted towards pro-corporate conservatism, so none of that would survive legal challenges and there would be a shit ton of corporate challenges.
All of these things would have to be done by Congress. The President is really not the dictator that the internet thinks he is (outside of some particular domains). But just to go through those:
Make it expensive to change the weight of a product.
How? Make the government track the size of ever possible consumable product and mandate a fee when changed? Beyond the enormous logistical effort for no obvious purpose, this would also make it costly for a company to add more product. Perhaps you only apply the fee when a size decreases, but then, how do you handle the case where a company intentionally launches a smaller sized version for a different market, eg individual or snack sized portions? What if they launch a new size and then discontinue the older, larger one, so it technically didn’t change? Does that have a fine? Sure, you can try to track all of this stuff carefully and determine what the net effect is, but that costs time and money all for no significant benefit.
Standardize the size and weight of a given type of product
Who determines the standard, and why? Why should it be illegal to sell a smaller or larger bag of chips or soda?
Require the packaging to alert consumers that the weight have changed in the last year and how much it has changed
This would just be one more tiny disclaimer line on the back that nobody would read. Not to mention, the size and weight is already on the package. Consumers are already perfectly capable of seeing the weight and deciding if the value for that price is good. I somewhat doubt most people would actually change their behavior by learning that there were ten more chips in the bag a year ago, and at any rate, companies know that consumers would rather pay the same price for less than pay a higher price for the same amount.
Tie the trademark of a given product to a certain weight.
That is categorically not how trademarks work.
Law requiring all prices to be in a format of
$ per actual measurement unit and include all applicable taxes.
Presidents can’t pass laws and the House Republican majority is basically dedicated to going against whatever Biden proposes.
We have that in the Netherlands; it’s very helpful. You usually see a price per kilo or a price per liter. Makes it really easy to just look at product X, Y and Z and see which one is actually more expensive, without having to do math in your head. That really should be the law everywhere.
$ per actual measurement unit
I’ve already seen this in essentially every supermarket ever, usually per ounce. Sure, you have to have some vague intuition about what that is relative to the product, but you can still make standardized comparisons across, say, different kinds of chips, very easily.
It’d be nice to include taxes, I agree.
Talking a big game and then not doing anything? You have stumbled onto the secret plan of Joe Biden Democrats politicians Homo sapiens.
If politicians were serious in their criticism they would vote for laws forcing comparison price to be displayed next to the purchase price.
Require that $/oz is always displayed in equal size as the per package price.
That has never stopped presidents before. In response to inflation in 1971 President Nixon issued an executive order making it illegal to raise prices for several months and before him FDR went even farther with rationing and controlling wages.
Inflation is actually super easy to control. You just need to be willing to threaten business leaders with serious jail time.
My opinion is regulate it so any shrinking has to be marked in large bold caps lettering NOW X% SMALLER for at least 1 year. Then people might actually stop buying shrunken goods and opt for a competitor.
Stop! Or I’ll say stop again!
I was talking to a friend recently and mentioned that Lil Debbie Fudge Rounds used to be the same diameter as the “Double Decker” ones.
Now they’re smaller than the diameter of an air hockey puck. And don’t even get me started on how regular Oreo Cookies used to look like the double stuff Oreos. The gall to cut the product in half, add the other half back to it, then charge more and have the balls to call it “double…”
