The Shrinking Tea-bag
Photo Credit: Unilever
I recall an episode on the Jack Benny Program (1950-1965) where Rochester, while hanging clothes in the closet, pockets a quarter that fell out of Jack's pants. Later in the show, the very frugal Jack pulls that same pair of pants off the rack and buoys the pants aloft and noticing a lightness therein, yells out, "Rochester, where's my quarter?" Or something like that.
Not many of us have the ability to notice a few grams missing in our pants, even fewer will notice that teabags in the UK will soon be a fifth of a gram lighter:
The Sunday Times, 15 Mar 2015, ‘You little tea leaf.’ Bags hold less of a brew
PG TIPS, Britain’s favourite tea brand, has been accused of short-changing the nation’s millions of cuppa lovers by quietly cutting the amount of tea in its teabags while keeping the price the same.
New packets of 80 teabags, which are expected to appear on supermarket shelves in the next few weeks, contain 18g or 7% less tea than the old packets. There has been no reduction in the price.
So PG Tips tea-bags will go from 3.1175 grams to 2.8925 grams per bag or a difference of 0.225 grams. For my American audience, that's about .007 of an ounce less per teabag or, put another way, British tea drinkers will get one ounce less tea every 126 teabags. Impossible to tell the difference.
Of course a fifth of a gram difference is not as egregious a cut as 1.7 ounces off a jar of peanut butter or a 10% reduction in toilet paper, but if these mini-reductions are done often enough we may one day find our teabags looking like this:
