Casey: “You can’t wait a year to buy paper towels or to buy boneless chicken or to buy groceries or to buy Huggies diapers.”
Since fall 2023, Senator Casey has produced reports detailing his investigations into corporate greed squeezing families’ budgets
Casey’s investigation into companies reducing product size while selling at the same sticker price or higher is featured in today’s New York Times
Washington, D.C. – In case you missed it, today, the New York Times featured an investigation by U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Subcommittee on Children & Families, on shrinkflation. Casey has been taking big corporations to task for price gouging, causing the excessive increase in prices American families are facing. His recent series of reports show working families across our Nation are paying higher prices due to greedflation, when big corporations use economic turmoil as cover to raise prices beyond the rate of inflation, and shrinkflation, which occurs when big corporations reduce product size without lowering prices accordingly or notifying consumers.
Senator Casey has been spearheading congressional efforts to hold big corporations accountable for prioritizing their profits over the American people. In December 2023, Senator Casey released his shrinkflation report detailing how big corporations are making record profits by reducing the size of household consumer goods. In January 2024, he urged the Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog, to investigate the effects of corporate greed on American consumers. In February 2024, Casey introduced legislation to protect American families from greedflation by banning grossly excessive price increases and crack down on corporate price gouging.
Read more from the New York Times here or below:
New York Times: Biden Targets a New Economic Villain: Shrinkflation
Mr. Biden could also embrace new legislation seeking to empower the Federal Trade Commission to more aggressively investigate and punish corporate price gouging, including in grocery stories.
White House officials credit Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, with bending the president’s ear on the issue. Mr. Casey’s office released a scathing shrinkflation report last year calculating that about one-tenth of recent price increases for snacks and toilet paper were attributable to companies’ reducing the number of cookies in a bag or sheets on a roll.
Mr. Casey has centered the issue in his re-election campaign, blaming large companies for price increases that have left consumers struggling to afford sufficient amounts of essential items. “Some of this is really pernicious,” he said in an interview. “You can’t wait a year to buy paper towels or to buy boneless chicken or to buy groceries or to buy Huggies diapers.”
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