Remarkably enough, the price of a locally-brewed beer here in Beijing is still exactly the same as it was back when I first arrived more than 5 years ago. OK, these days there's a rather higher percentage of grubby little restaurants that fancy themselves to be just genteel enough to warrant charging 3 kuai a bottle (about 40 cents) rather than the base rate of 2 kuai..... but basically there's been no movement on price in all that time. There have been quite big jumps in the cost of most other daily staples, but beer..... beer has seemed immune to these unfortunate side-effects of economic boom.
Except that...... heck, I'm sure the big bottle of Yanjing pijiu used to hold 675ml back in the good old days. But a couple of years or so ago, a lot of the bottles suddenly appeared to have been scaled down to 645 or 640ml. And just recently, a new standard bottle has appeared, of a paltry 600ml. The alcohol content has been slightly reduced too (and it never was all that potent). BOO!
Oh, they've done it very craftily as well - the elegant design of the bottle, the subtle thickening of the glass: it's really not conspicuously smaller than the old ones. But I am starting to notice that I can get through one a good 10% faster.....
Inflation by stealth - only in China would they conceive of such a thing! Or do my readers know of similar skullduggery elsewhere in the world?
2 comments:
Hate to break it to you, bro, but this has been standard practice for years with chocolate bars.
After you reduce the size enough times, you then put out the king size version, at a higher price, back at the original size.
Yeah, but who cares about chocolate?
This is beer we're talking about!
I'm looking forward to a nostalgia promotion of Yanjing 'King Size' in a few years...
Post a Comment