You’ve heard of shrinkflation, when brands make their products smaller, often undetectably so, and charge the same price. You may also have heard of skimpflation, when products remain the same size but are made with cheaper ingredients. Here’s a new one: spaving, a merging of “spending” and “saving” where consumers are enticed—you’re $9.37 away from free shipping!—to save more by spending more.

Like those other portmanteaus, it’s a strategy that many retailers are executing but which personal finance experts are cautioning consumers about.

Term on a dime: If it seems like the term came out of nowhere, it’s because it kind of did. Google searches for “spaving” were virtually nonexistent over the last five years, then spiked on the week of May 5–11, according to Google trends.

In the 30 days ending June 30, there were 693 mentions of “spaving” on social media, an astonishing 34,550% increase over the previous 30 days, when there were just two, according to Hootsuite data compiled exclusively for Retail Brew.

During that same period, the three posts about spaving that earned the most engagement all were on YouTube, with CNBC topping the list, followed by The Millionaire Morning Show with Anton Daniels (which posted about spaving twice), and The Ramsey Show, per Hootsuite.

While the coinage may be new, many practices spaving encompasses are as old as the—ka-ching!—cash register.

Keep reading here.—AAN

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Google the “Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro” this week and you’ll notice that the stainless steel kitchen gadget with algorithmically enhanced heating is the same price at Best Buy, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, and PC Richard: $299.95, or 25% off the list price, which is the same deal Amazon is offering during its two-day Prime Day sales event.

Kirthi Kalyanam, professor and executive director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University, told Retail Brew that this kind of price matching is becoming more common around Prime Day, and it could eventually make it harder for the e-commerce giant’s deals to stand out during the summer sales season that it helped create.

“What I think is going to happen is Amazon will need to work harder and harder at making sure that customers are indeed excited,” he said. “Traffic can go up, but the question is…how much customers believe those deals are really great deals, and Amazon’s going to have to work harder at that, only because everybody else has something going on.”

Keep reading here.—AV

With Americans enduring heat waves, you’d think that ice cream would be flying out of supermarket freezers, but it turns out that sales over the last few years have been a bit of a rocky road.

After peaking in 2020, when Covid shutdowns saw increasing numbers of consumers indulging in ice cream at home instead of ice cream shops, unit sales have been dropping, according to recent data from 84.51˚, the retail data science company Kroger owns.

Due to inflationary prices, however, revenues are up slightly (~1%) for the 52 weeks ending June 8, according to the 84.51° Stratum database, which aggregates data from the more than 62 million households that shopped at Kroger-owned grocery stores over the last year.

Cold comfort: A bright spot for the industry shines on ice cream lovers who want to save by buying in bulk: Dollar sales of pails of the diet-annihilating six-quart size have risen 35% over the last year.

Keep reading here.—AAN

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