Skip to main content

Basic Chip

As some who rarely buys potato chips, I have not paid attention to how they are priced these days. 

In the wake of rising potato chip prices, more consumers have been turning to private-label, less-expensive store brand options. The New York Times reported back in October 2023 that “private-label foods and beverages have crept up to a 20.6 % share of grocery dollars from 18.7% before the pandemic,” citing market research from Circana.

Potato chips are just another food item that inflation-weary consumers are either abandoning or seeking cheaper alternatives for. Consumers did the same with fast food which led to several chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy's to release their own rendition of value meals.

We do have this long-standing road-trip tradition where I'll buy a big bag of potato chips for the road if we are in a foreign country. I like picking a popular local flavor I would not find back at home. Its a way to indulge in and understand what kind of chip the locals favor. In all these years, I have never run into a bag of potato chips with a flavor that disappointed. It seems like everywhere people know how to get their potato chips to taste great. If it goes back to being the basic potato chip everywhere because consumers don't want to pay extra for favorite brand-names, our road-trip chip eating binge might suffer. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more