Profit is what business is about. Grocers long ago learnt that positioning is important to “guide” customers’ hands to put the most profitable items in their baskets.
Hiya jennypearen
The business pays Woolworths “shelf placement” money to put their product on a particular spot on the shelf. If a business wants their products to be in the most convenient hand-high position - they have to pay more!
Woolworths naturally puts their Brand at the best level, and all others around it UNLESS they pay a premium…
Money makes the world go around… sadly!
Cheers Natalie 
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Would this be a response to consumers or a cynical price rise with lots of top spin?
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It seems to be the norm for overseas companies to change iconic Australian brands that they’ve purchased whilst giving an explanation that it was what we told them we wanted. Well, didn’t the Campbell Soup Company get it wrong with the Arnott’s Shapes varieties? Apparently we told them we wanted completely different flavours to what we’ve all grown up with, yet the backlash was so great they eventually went back to the original recipes for most of the flavours.
So now we apparently want less beans in our cans for the same price that we paid for a decent size can the previous week, because we supposedly asked for the change. They’d have us believe that we were complaining about the bean to toast ratio per can being too much in favour of the beans with our poor slices of toast being completely overwhelmed, oh the horrors!!! In reality, they just want to give us less beans in each can as a cost saving measure for their own purse strings and think that we’re all too stupid to see through their marketing hype which makes out that we’re now better off because of it. People are already changing brands in protest.
If you mess with iconic Australian favourites, there’s little chance of getting away with it now that there’s so many people using social media who are quite happy to get on their collective soap boxes and tell these companies what they can do with their new improved versions of everything. Prepare for the second wave of protests when they change the tinned spaghetti sizes, which they’ve already announced as if it’s yet another thing that we wanted and that we’ll be patting them on the back for.
When I was a boy growing up in the 1970s my mother used to try and hide tripe in a bowl of hot white sauce and then tell me that I liked it. What she failed to realise was that I actually didn’t like it and no amount of telling me that I did like it was going to make me actually eat the stuff. These overseas companies are basically feeding us tripe and assuming we’ll believe them if they tell us that we asked for it because it’s what we want to have.
Even KRAFT has felt the backlash of being an American owned company that makes a profit from brands that were once Australian owned, and that’s without making major changes to our products. It got so bad that they changed their brand name for all their overseas acquired products to Mondolez International regardless of which country the product was originally acquired from. Consumers in other countries were also giving them the cold shoulder for just being KRAFT, so after they changed the name of the new subsidiary group, they proceeded to removed the actual brand labels from their now Mondolez International owned products in the hopes that the rest of the world would just forget that their native products were no longer native products. This is why Vegemite no longer has the KRAFT label on it. KRAFT peanut butter has recently lost the KRAFT logo as well. It didn’t really help though as the consumers weren’t as stupid as they’d hoped we were, so they recently washed their hands of Vegemite altogether and sold it back to Australia via the Bega Cheese Company, who also purchased the rights to put the KRAFT logo back onto the label if they so desire. Personally I’d be happy for it to have a Bega logo on it.
Anyways, getting back to @PhilT’s original question, YES, it is a cynical price rise with lots of top spin, and unfortunately, it’s becoming common practice, even though the people rise up and vote with their wallets by purchasing a different brand in protest.
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Did you ever wonder why consumer backlash (Vegemite, New Coke, Heinz, Kraft, etc) is usually widespread and in their corporate faces, but a worse level of disdain toward us, coming from a pollie and his/her party, rarely affects voting in large numbers, save for a small number of seats? And while we know the petrol price cycle is pure BS we bear it, not that there is an alternative as the companies march in lockstep, but ‘nothing to see’ according to those who could affect it. The irresponsibles are returned by the welded-on. The psychology is curious.
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It’s much easier to change your brand from Heinz to SPC than it is to get rid of a corrupt pollie. I quite often ask if we can treat the crooked politicians like we would treat a scrabble board full of dud letters and just put everything back in the bag, but instead of shaking it around and picking some new tiles from what’s available, maybe we could just throw the bag away and crack open a fresh deck of cards to play with instead. 
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Yes Heinz beans are NOW - SMALLER SIZE CAN - same price. Great advance - saves us getting fat?
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