2023-12-28 11:49:30
Like every end of the year for six years, the magazine 60 million consumers awards its “Cactus” which highlights the bad practices of brands.
He who thinks he takes is taken. As part of its annual ranking of “Cacti” which highlight bad corporate practices, the magazine 60 million consumers awarded the first prize, “the Golden Cactus”, to the Carrefour group. During a year 2023 marked by persistent food inflation, the mass distribution player indulged in the famous “shrinkflation”, a practice consisting of reducing the quantity of a product sold without lowering the price. Carrefour, however, intended to visually denounce this process on its shelves.
At the start of the September school year, the mass distribution group had placed 26 orange signals to highlight products from major brands guilty of “shrinkflation” such as Lipton Ice Tea, Alaskan Pollock Findus and Lay’s crisps. Problem: Carrefour had itself resorted to this practice a few months previously as part of its range of entry-level fresh vegetables which it wanted to keep at less than 1 euro per unit. Without changing the price, the bag of three salads contained only two, the fillet of one and a half kilos of potatoes lost 500 grams and the punnets of mushrooms and radishes went from 250 to 200 grams.
“Just before this well-publicized drumming, Carrefour had discreetly reduced the capacity of certain bottles and packs of fresh fruit juice from 1 liter to 90 centiliters to cushion the increase in the raw material, orange and grapefruit,” adds the magazine.
The targeted environmental issue
But Carrefour is not the only company whose bad practices are denounced by 60 million consumers. The Swedish giant Ikea is also on the list due to partial compliance with its circular economy commitments. While it has been committed for almost two years to taking back old furniture from its customers for any delivery of a new item on simple request and free of charge, customers complain of being confronted with refusals from the delivery people, especially when the furniture delivered is bulky like a sofa.
The magazine also criticizes the Chinese Shein whose activity, which promotes the overconsumption of new clothing, is particularly harmful for the planet. To do this, 60 million consumers relied on edifying figures from the NGO “Friends of the Earth”. Last May, the brand’s website put more than 7,000 new clothing models online, the manufacturing of which represents “between 15,000 and 20,000 tonnes of CO2 emitted daily”.
“In 2022, 3.3 billion items of clothing were put on the market in France, underlines 60 million consumers citing the 2022 report from the eco-organization Refashion. That is 500 million more than the previous year and a billion more than ten years ago.”
While inexpensive clothing, which corresponds to the range offered by Shein, is only worn between 7 and 8 times according to a study by McKinsey, the manufacture of a cotton t-shirt requires an equivalent quantity of water at 70 showers. The opportunity for the magazine to recall that compliance with the Paris agreement would imply that the French limit themselves to the annual purchase of 5 items of clothing per inhabitant… compared to 40 in 2022.
The SNCF without surprise
Other private groups or public organizations mentioned in the “Cactus” list are regularly the target of more or less virulent criticism from dissatisfied customers on social networks. This is the case of the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM) which owes its presence in the 2023 list to the difficulties of certain customers in reaching its agents by telephone in order to recreate a lost Vitale card, for example.
Among the companies accustomed to complaints, we also find the SNCF. “While everything should encourage the French to take the train rather than other polluting means of transport, the SNCF persists in being dissuasive with its prices, unpleasant in its practices and innovative in the problems it can cause to its users “, deplores 60 million consumers. This year, the magazine points out the soaring costs of changing tickets, the reduction in time to do so, and the increase in the price of the Avantage card. Added to this are the usual delays or cancellations of trains, the reduction in frequency as well as the replacement of direct routes with connections.
“However, it would be unfair to put everything on the SNCF alone,” he says. “The State does not help it enough: with only 45 euros of investment per year and per inhabitant, France is last in Europe, far behind in particular Germany (124 euros) and Italy (103 euros).”
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