It's not just Cepacol, we all know from our experience, and it has been widely reported in the press, that popular products are now being repackaged into smaller amounts. One-pound packages are now downsized into 12 oz packages, quart containers are downsized to 750 ml, and so forth. The prices remain about the same ( slightly reduced or even higher!) but the quantity of merchandise is reduced substantially.

It's not all that surprising, allegedly,manufacturing costs are going up (even though labor and inflation rates have been surprisingly low lately...), and it is natural for sellers to deliver less product for the same money, taking advantage of consumer recognition of standard package sizes and appearance to help disguise the fact that we're actually paying more for the same amount.

But sometimes, even taking that into account, it doesn't really make sense. For example, the popular cough drop, Cepacol, used to come in a package with 18 drops inside, each package containing two cards, each card holding nine drops. Each card was a sealed plastic sandwich with a 3x3 tic-tac-toe of 9 drops.

I just bought Cepacol in an identical package to the one I'm familiar with, but the cards now only contain 8 drops each. The central position in the 3x3 matrix has now been left vacant. This amounts to approximately an 11% reduction in product.

It makes sense, they're trying to save money, but upon reflection, that can't be the whole reason. For starters, they must have to retool their factory to manufacture the new sandwich cards, because there is no trace of the middle pocket that used to carry a drop. It's just a blank space now. In other words, it cost them money to change the packaging. Second, we also know that the actual cost of the product itself is only a tiny piece of the total cost. Most of it goes into packaging, distribution, marketing, overhead and profit, none of which is affected by reducing the number of drops. So the savings derived by a decrease in 11% of product cannot mean an increase of 11% in revenue, per package. They probably don't make any more money per package than they did before. They probably lose money, or at best break even. So what gives?

The answer of course, is that they sell more packages. They get an 11% increase in sales, without anything being any different. On the average, people will buy Cepacol more frequently now than they used to, even though they aren't consuming any more than before.