Häagen-Dazs, owned by ice cream giant Dreyer's, just announced that they're "downsizing" their pints of ice cream. In a truly Orwellian use of language, the erstwhile standard 16 ounce pint will now be an, um, 14 ounce pint.
Häagen-Dazs said that rising material costs have forced this change. They can't raise prices of their ice cream and remain competitive with Ben & Jerry's and other premium ice creams. So they've opted to shrink portion sizes. In a letter to their franchisees, the company wrote
Our ice cream is created with only a few select, simple, all-natural ingredients.
That is why we searched six years for the perfect variety of strawberry for our Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream and why we paid four times more over the last two years for the raspberries that make it into our Häagen-Dazs raspberry sorbet.
And we wouldn’t think of soaking the raisins for our Häagen-Dazs rum raisin ice cream even a minute less than the 60,480 minutes (42 days, actually) that they currently luxuriate in their rum baths.
Why not? Because then it just wouldn’t be Häagen-Dazs.
Apparently, it "just wouldn’t be Häagen-Dazs" if they did an A3 with their staff to figure out how to reduce the 60,480 minutes of raisin soaking without compromising flavor. Or if they worked with their supply chain to reduce the cost of growing, picking, packing, and shipping strawberries or raspberries so it wouldn't cost four times more. (More than what?)
Sadly, the company operates with the old Price = Cost + Profit mentality, so the only option open to them is to redefine a pint as 14 ounces.
Does that mean that they'll report their earnings in the same way? Will they redefine their net income such that $0.87 in profit become $1.00?