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S is for “shrinkflation!”
Beloved “Sesame Street” figure Cookie Monster lashed out at companies hawking their food wares at the same price but with less actual product — a practice known as “shrinkflation.”
“Me hate shrinkflation!” the “Sesame Street” character told his 626,000 fans on X, the platform that used to be known as Twitter, on Monday. “Me cookies are getting smaller.”
It was a sentiment shared by the White House, which responded Monday, “C is for consumers getting ripped off.”
And then President Joe Biden himself, speaking at a White House event Tuesday, embraced his cookie-loving blue pal and called out aggressive, profit-driven food companies.
“I’ll tell you what, I tell you who did notice, Cookie Monster. He pointed out cookies, or his cookies are getting smaller, paying the same price,” Biden said. “I was stunned when I found out that’s what actually happened.”
The snacker-in-chief took particular aim at potato chip makers.
“Even as supply chains are back to normal, some companies are still not passing along the savings to their customers,” he said.
“Many corporations are raising their prices, pad the profits, charging folks more and more for less and less. In fact, some of the small snack companies, you won’t — think you won’t even notice what they’re doing, when they charge you just as much for the same size bag of potato chips, only there’s a helluva lot fewer chips in it.”
Puppeteer Frank Oz, an early collaborator with Jim Henson, didn’t endorse “shrinkflation” Tuesday, but he was outraged that his Cookie Monster character would even wade into such weighty issues.
“I’m shocked to see a news article on Cookie Monster talking about ‘shrinkflation,’” Oz wrote on X.
He said Henson, who died in 1990, would never have supported “Sesame Street” characters’ taking such public stances because they “need to live in their own pure world. Not our world.”
“What has happened to the integrity of the character and the integrity of Sesame Workshop?” Oz added.
Despite Oz’s criticism, “Sesame Street” characters have long chimed in on various topical concerns.
For example, Elmo last month appeared on the “TODAY” show to promote mental health. And Biden backed Elmo, saying that: “I know how hard it is some days to sweep the clouds away and get to sunnier days.”
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