January 8, 2024 - 6:00pm
An early contender for Rant of the Year comes from a thus-far anonymous British woman, who made waves on social media at the weekend. The target of her rage is a box of Quality Street — specifically, the replacement of the traditional foil wrappers with lacklustre paper. The redesign is “a travesty”, she says, adding that the manufacturers can “put their chocolates where the sun never shines”.
For all the online mirth, this isn’t a total overreaction. Though the edible part of the product remains the same, the presentation has changed for the worse. The jewel-like effect is gone and, henceforth, the festive season will be just that little bit less magical than it used to be. As comedian and writer Simon Evans points out, the product symbolises “every other incremental degradation of finish, sparkle and yes quality” that consumers have “endured lately”.
Go into any supermarket and one will find ample evidence not just of rising prices, but also other disappointments such as diminishing portion sizes (shrinkflation) and qualitative corner-cutting (skimpflation). So while shouting at confectionery might seem excessive, it isn’t just a box of chocolates we’re talking about here, but a microcosm of contemporary capitalism.
Defenders of the free-market system have always had a problem, which is that consumers are much more likely to focus on what has become worse over time than on what has improved. Capitalism has historically made a lot of things better, and continues to do so. For instance, cars have become more reliable, not to mention safer and more efficient. As for telephones, there’s no comparison between the multi-functional, mobile marvels of our own age and the analogue, dial-up devices of old. So given all those positives, why do we accentuate the negative?
It comes down to the saying “you don’t miss what you never had”. The obvious corollary is that if you do have something and it’s taken away, then you’re going to be absolutely furious about it. That’s especially the case when, like a tin of Quality Street, it’s easier to compare today’s product with yesterday’s.
To add insult to injury, businesses are using their marketing skills to make a selling point of their downgrades. For instance, the Quality Street website promotes its paper wrappers as “returning to our roots” and as being good for the environment because they’re more recyclable. Similarly, soft drinks manufacturers replace the sugar in their products with inferior-tasting artificial sweeteners while proclaiming the health benefits.
A more significant example is the property industry. Thanks to the ever-increasing cost of land, we’re paying increasingly more to live in the same places — only with less room — than our parents and grandparents. It’s arguably the most damaging downgrade of the modern age, and yet this too is sold to us as a positive.
Sky-high rents and pokey flats are promoted as “city centre living”. When a neighbourhood ceases to be affordable, then it is “up-and-coming”. If living costs are completely out of control, then never mind the impoverishment of an entire generation — just think of the investment opportunities.
Businesses probably think they’re being clever here, but they’re forgetting the bigger picture. The essential promise of the free market is ever-increasing abundance. The more they try to sell us scarcity, the closer they come to breaking the deal on which support for capitalism depends.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeIt’s a bit unfair to blame capitalism for the effects of the government’s overreaction to Covid19 and Vladimir Putin. And as for housing, there hasn’t been a free market in it since 1947 when the Town and Country Planning Act centrally planned all land use in the country.
Look to the State, that’s where the fault lies, either our own or someone else’s.
Thanks for highlighting that typical slight of hand. Capitalism has many weaknesses indeed but, they are predominantly driven by the human greed of the individual practitioners. That greed would also express itself in any other imaginable system we could create. So how about we work on perfecting the system which feeds, clothes and houses most of the world. Intelligently applied light touch regulation and maximised competition are the least worst ways we have of achieving that end. Societies with a clear publicly projected moral compass would be a nice supporting bonus.
Great comment.
I thought it was a bit slight actually.
Sleight(ly) touchy aren’t we?
We do not like regulation in general but the bottom line is that if you do not have basic good regulation that safeguards honest/fair competition with a reliable justice system to make sure all are dealt with in the same way, you get poorer. See all places where corruption flourishes….
The problem at the moment is that much of the regulation is designed to prevent animal spirits (oligopoly lobbying to create moats). Combined with network effects, it has created winner takes all entities which is a country mile from true capitalism. So light touch regulation desirable, but anti-trust/moat destruction needs to be the priority and we can see US moving in this direction. The next 20 years is a period of state-directed ‘capitalism’ with capital corraled to key sectors/pet projects. Financial repression already started and will continue to warm up the frogs for the foreseeable future.
The government overreacted to Vladimir Putin?
I did not say it did.
I won one of those same boxes of Quality street in 1974 by picking some place on a map based on some vague clue.
It was very exciting – a big can full of dazzlingly wrapped chocolates. That paper wrap is Not the same. What a wretched,penny pinching, change. In fairness they should make the outside of the tin be flat paint on a paper wrapper like a can of beans showing the drab candy inside. Then it would be fair.
And – what is with it being half full?
Less stuff, less quality, higher price – the inflation ‘Trifecta’. Well done ‘Quality Street’.
I actually quite like the new look of Quality Street – pleasingly retro!
I preferred the ones we got in the 1970s that were the size of a bass drum and lasted halfway to Easter.
Things in the 1970s were always better apart from, well, the economy….
Quite. I’m not a 70s nostalgia bore by the way, but I was a child back then instead of a middle-aged man, so my principle concerns were sweetshops, toyshops and making sure I didn’t miss Bewitched and Space 1999 on the telly on Saturday mornings.
And cars and the food, the railways, housing, medical treatment. TV oh and cinema seats, and [carries on for 14 pages]
I didn’t know about this change, but this article has allowed me to make sense of something that happened recently.
On Christmas Eve, I was walking the dog at a local popular viewpoint overlooking the sea. It’s the sort of place where people leave wreaths and bunches of flowers and little notes about departed loved ones. The dog headed straight for an octagonal box. When I investigated, I found a box of Quality Street with a beautiful hand-written note attached. It said, in effect, that Mum, who was sadly missed, always gave visitors a choc, so happy Christmas, and please take one.
I thought this was lovely, and took two for my children. I don’t eat chocolates. Then I got to thinking about those horror stories from American “trick or treat” where psychopaths put slivers of razor blades or rat poison in sweets. I would have risked it myself, had I eaten chocolates, but could I inflict the risk on my children?
When I got home, I showed my wife the chocs, and explained the situation and my dilemma. She has no doubts. “Throw them away immediately, you daft b!$^*@r!” she said. “They’ve obviously been tampered with – they’re not even in the proper wrappers!”
If you think Quality Street is shoddy you obviously don’t shop at Tesco
Until about 18 months ago Tesco used to provide free disposable bags for loose fruit and veg.
The withdrew the free disposable bags and replaced them with allegedly reusable nylon bags for which they charge 30p
I now take my own plastic bags, which I purchase from Aldi where I am doing an increased proportion of my shopping
The American candy psychopaths are largely a myth.
I bought some Jaffa Cakes yesterday for the first time in ages to find that they’re now the size of 10p pieces
Oddly enough I did the same last week. Not eaten a jaffa cake in years but saw a pack on the shelf in Waitrose and decided to buy it. And you’re quite right, they always used to be two or three bites big but now I could eat a whole one in a single bite quite comfortably. They really ought to be sold alongside packets of Rolos.
“inferior-tasting artificial sweeteners while proclaiming the health benefits” – All artificial sweeteners harm your health.
Britain has been a welfare state since at least the 1940s. Did you not think that would have some sort of effect? Despite the unmatched exceptional potential of the British people, the socialist disease keeps beating you down.
Also, I seem to remember that this sort of miserable decline and loathing (labor nastiness, malaise and bad government) was the same story decades ago, until St. Margaret had her epiphany and turned things around. So go find thee another savior willing to waive around Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” in a minister’s counsel.
I don’t live in Britain, so I don’t know, but I’m guessing that I would now find many small boutique producers of fabulous chocolates (and made without too many chemicals, fair trade and all that) all over the U.K.
Despite the ‘socialist disease’ I suspect that many more of the poor can afford chocolates like Quality Street than ever before. And the rest of us have moved on to luxurious bespoke chocolatiers (you can’t afford to eat as much, but then, you won’t get as fat).
So that’s capitalism – if you don’t like the presentation of supermarket chocolates, send a market signal by not buying them but rather adding to the demand for locally made, fresh, beautifully packaged chocs.
Yes, but all this was done despite the government, not because of government. Think what could have been achieved if governance wasn’t so socialist.
What the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions was to be able to feed an expanding population and provide them with goods at cheaper prices. The harnessing of water and then coal to power machines in factories combined with canals which reduced transport cost followed by building railways and inventing refrigeration, reduced costs, especially food. What the A and I Revolutions achieved was free humans from hunger after two failed harvests.
It is not capitalism but the willingness to take risks to develop new technology which enables a few people in boutique chocolatiers to increase output above what a few individuals could make using ingredients delivered by pack horse.
If ever there is an argument for the benefits of capitalism it lies in the fact that the wrapper of a chocolate is not quite as shiny as it once was.
What other system produces abundance to the level such that a small change in the luminosity of a wrapper is considered an outrage?
Personally, if they have to cut costs I’d much rather the chocs stay the same and economies made on the wrapper.
I detect something more insidious than communism here: net zero. Show me a communist country that has any intention of achieving that ruinous goal. Just enough effort to claim the billions being thrown away. Rather sensible of them actually…
Net Zero? Sort of. Isn’t it really though enterprising capitalists reducing costs and increasing profits behind the cloak of NZ?
P.S.I prefer Heroes.
Yes, I suspect you are right in most cases, such as this. Virtue signalling at customers’ expense.
China claims to be communist and is really serious about it.
Interesting article. And I quite take the final point:
“…the closer they come to breaking the deal on which support for capitalism depends.”
However, I think this deal was broken from the moment it was struck. It was always dishonest. Chesterton was right: both Capitalism and Socialism intentionally lead to monopoly. The question of which sort of megalomaniac we would prefer to ‘drip down’ wealth in either system, is a moot point: they are the same people. I suspect Bezos and Gates (et al) would have been high up Party Members if the system they lived in was different. I can’t prove it of course, but it seems reasonable to me that such ‘driven’ people will always aim for power, influence and wealth, whatever their circumstances; and to claim that it is only Capitalism in which such people would ‘choose’ to merit success would, it seems to me, be tantamount to claiming some moral high ground for either our current system or the Capitalists themselves. I am deeply cynical regarding either possibility.
Again, I may be wrong. Perhaps they are morally virtuous men operating in a moral system and that’s how they got to the top. But the existence of their exact counterparts in China suggests otherwise.
No harm in a bit of ‘portion-size’ deflation is there, unless of course it’s some dreadful Woke plot!
This is 100% due to state regulation & planning laws preventing the market from actually working. There is plenty of land, we’re just not allowed to built on it, which is what makes the bits you can so expensive. Without the state preventing it, Kent would have been paved over from Dover to Croydon decades ago & there would not be a ‘housing crisis’. This is a crisis of statism, not capitalism.
Quality Street are seriously unpleasant and hopefully this will cause many users to change to a better brand
What is going on at Unherd? I’ve just joined because I wanted access to some thoughtful authors. The first two articles I’ve read are touting communism, one openly and one surreptitiously, like this one.
Is the paper money-saving or environment-saving? No justification at all for producing millions of little plastic squares when biodegradable paper does the job just as well.
My complaint with these boxes has always been that the flavours taint all the others. This has been a problem with paper or plastic wrapping. Oddly, Heroes are the only sealed ones (in plastic…) and they’re the only chocolates that would all taste the same anyway.
Anyway, it’s obvious capitalism is a bust system.
Can’t say I would object to this reduction in single use plastic personally! I think you can be vehemently anti Net Zero and still care about recycling and plastic.
I have also forgiven Yeo Valley for reducing the size of their organic butter packets sneakily – business pressures must be horrendous today.
I get the sense lots of people who call themselves conservatives aren’t particularly, they seem to think that means consumerism at the highest possible level, without any thought to the preservation of the commons, or virtues such as temperance, which were once, and I would say still ought to be, at the center of conservatism.
the US my lord of the land raised the rent without any improvements just because some greed profit maximizing algorithm said it could not the government. Told them 3 years ago roof leaks no heater garbage disposal broken
Now two grand !!
In the US my lord of the land raised the rent without any improvements just because some greed profit maximizing algorithm said it could not the government. Told them 3 years ago roof leaks no heater garbage disposal broken
Now two grand !!
192O W 218th Torrance CA 90501
The power of semiotics in action!
A more quirky chocolate anecdote … when a very famous British chocolate brand switched out foil for plastic wrap sales went down because ithe foil was popular with drug users.
‘If you are in doubt of people’s motives, just look at the consequences of their actions.’ (Jordan Peterson).