The incredible shrinking lip balm

On the inside back cover of Consumer Reports magazine you find a feature entitled "Selling It". This regularly features what the magazine calls, "goofs, glitches, gotchas".

I think this falls into the category of a "gotcha" I don't like dry lips, so I use lip balm. Blistex seems to work pretty well, and the flavours are not too repulsive.

My wife bought this box of Blistex for me. Now if you saw this box, what size of Blistex tube would you expect to find inside, the big one or the small one?

Despite the fact that the box seems a perfect fit for the big tubes, it contained four of the small ones. And how much smaller is the small tube? The net content of the Blistex tube has gone from 4.25 grams to 2.83 grams, a reduction of 33.4%.

No change in price, but a big reduction in grams per dollar. How will consumers react? The vast majority of them won't even notice, which is what the manufacturer is counting on.