Demand For Batteries Is Shrinking, Yet Prices Keep On Going and Going ... Up (wsj.com)

schwit1 shares a report: Batteries on average cost 8.2% more than a year ago, while prices in the overall household-care segment rose only 1.8%, according to Nielsen. At a time when prices are stagnating on everything from toilet paper to diapers, such pricing power for a product that is increasingly obsolete has confounded shoppers [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. "As far as the prices go, you don't have a choice," said Samuel Hurly, a contractor from Mount Vernon, N.Y., as he scanned a Home Depot display of AAA batteries to power flashlights he uses on the job. Batteries ordered online take too long to arrive, Mr. Hurly said, and he finds cheaper, private-label options lose power too quickly.

Battery prices were more likely to fluctuate a few years ago, when Duracell was owned by consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble Co. and Energizer was part of Edgewell Personal Care Co. Those companies were more focused on their bigger, more profitable razor businesses -- Edgewell with Schick and P&G with Gillette. They would invest less in batteries, or slash prices to drive up volume, to compensate for weak sales in other units, said SunTrust analyst Bill Chappell. Energizer Holdings Inc. spun off from Edgewell in 2015, and Duracell broke apart from P&G a year later when it was acquired by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. schwit1 asks, "Both businesses have become more profit-focused since separating from their previous owners. Is the Energizer/Duracell duopoly ripe for disruption?"

Comments

Ripe for disruption

[mysidia]

And not environmentally friendly to have disposable batteries with plastics and electrolyte compounds tossed into landfills.

Time to ban disposable batteries and introduce LiON chemistry replacement cartridges for these old AA and AAA cells.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[jellomizer]

Please ask a Galaxy Note 7 user about LiON batteries.

The main Risk with swapping batteries, is the fact older devices may not be designed for them to run on. Not expecting them to heat up as much, putting them in a confined location where they cannot expand. And just different power usage and lasting power change, could effect the usefulness of products.

Yes new devices should reconsider the standard batteries. But older devices there wern't much choices other then NiMH which have less of a life.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[Luckyo]

No one wants Lithium-ion with its fire hazard, high cost and 3,7V voltage. NiMH is almost as good, has proper voltage for current applications and is pervasive.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[PPH]

Please ask a Galaxy Note 7 user about LiON batteries.

Please ask Boeing.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[JackieBrown]

That's why we need to ban disposable batteries so that we can force all the old stuff to break. We also need a law that forces all manufactors to replace anything for free that breaks due to the ban and pay each person for the inconvenience of being out whatever broke. And we also need a law stating these companies should also buy everyone a pony.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[DontBeAMoran]

And we also need a law stating these companies should also buy everyone a pony.

As long as we can pick both Fluttershy and Rarity, I'm fine with it.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[GameboyRMH]

If only NiMH had the proper voltage - it has a lower voltage - 1.2v vs. 1.5v, so the more cells the device takes, the greater the undervoltage. It does work decently for low-power devices that only take 1 or 2 batteries such as clocks and TV remotes, but let's not kid ourselves.

I've been trying out a commercial off-the-shelf alkaline battery recharger, although by now I use them in so few things that I've hardly been able to see how effective the recharged batteries are compared to new ones. It does work, but you can only safely recharge the batteries a few times before they're likely to leak.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[Luckyo]

Problem being that that's not how AA standard works. Alkaline battery goes from 1,5V at full charge to about 0,8 as it is close to being empty. As a result, AA devices are commonly configured to accept any voltage in that range.

Modern NiMH stays at very stable 1,2V throughout the charge, making them actually better than alkaline in most usage scenarios. The only problem is that they tend to trip "at below 1,2V, alkaline is probably at about 1/3 charge left, so change the battery please". I have this issue with xbox 360 wireless controller, where my second gen, 5 year old eneloops will trip that after about 10 hours of usage, and then keep powering the controller for about 40 more hours before they need to be swapped.

Typical alkalines trip it after about 20 hours, and shut down about 10 hours after that.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[Waccoon]

I've encountered a multitude of devices that won't even power on when given rechargeable batteries, as they expect a voltage over 1.2V to "reset" the battery meter.

A particularly annoying example was my first music player, as I explicitly bought a device powered by an AAA battery since I wanted it to last for a long time and didn't want to bother with a device with a built-in battery. Turns out, only alkaline AAA batteries would work. A freshly charged NiMH battery always threw a low battery warning and the device wouldn't even turn on. I also encountered many [early] digital cameras that had the same problem.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[Wycliffe]

I would have no problem supporting taxing environmentally unfriendly stuff like this especially if we offset it by lowering taxes elsewhere.

Surely it would make sense to use these additional funds to clean up environmental problem areas? Developing and building recycling centres for old batteries perhaps? As you mention, as the undesirable products die out this type of infrastructure can eventually be discontinued or re-tasked.

I don't have a big problem with the tax mitigating the problem for instance using the tobacco tax for smoking cessation programs or lung cancer research or using an additional battery tax to properly recycle single use batteries. This would have the added benefit of the tax slowly disappearing as the usage declines. If done correctly, taxes like this could help pay for the external costs that many environmentally destructive products have. The only drawback to this approach is that for the tax on something like the incandescent bulb to be effective it would likely have to be significantly higher than the direct external cost so some committee somewhere would have to decide how to best spend that money to clean up power plants, buy carbon offsets, etc...

Re:Ripe for disruption

[torkus]

The Note 7 in particular definitely IS banned on commercial flights.

I still agree with GP that the risk was greatly over-sensationalized. It made good reading but the actual number of devices shown to spew fire and brimstone were extremely few, especially in comparison to the number of devices sold.

The overall Li-Ion risk is real though. Individually, it's nearly zero. I have dozens, if not hundreds, of Li-Ion cells in my possession of the the course of a year and have never had one catch fire. However, others do and...if you have a large brick of them catch fire in the cargo hold of a plane you can quickly have a catastrophic situation. It might be a one in a billion chance, but there's several billion total passengers per year.

Re:Ripe for disruption

[dgatwood]

Lithium ion battery is a catch-all term for any battery that contains a bit of lithium in it (so maybe even the Starship Enterprise has one).

No, I believe it has two.

Isn't lithium supply pretty limited?

[brucekeller]

The price of lithium has skyrocketed in the last few years, so I assume the profit margins went down since the price of batteries didn't go lock step. Lithium batteries are one of the main things keeping EVs from being carbon neutral off the lot and they are just generally pretty bad for the environment. Hopefully graphene batteries come sooner rather than later.

Eneloop is the way to go

[ZorinLynx]

Nobody should be buying any batteries that aren't Eneloop rechargeables. They come charged, do not self discharge appreciably, and perform better than alkalines in most situations. Once you have a set you can keep using and recharging them for many years. I have decade old Eneloops that still work great.

Sanyo (later Panasonic) solved the rechargeable battery problem completely.

Re:Eneloop is the way to go

[Junta]

If you need more than 1.2V out of your alkaline battery, you will chew threw batteries pretty quickly. A typical discharge curve has about 40% capacity left when the alkaline hits 1.2V. Generally you don't consider an alkaline depleted until it's at 0.9V.

If you design for 1.5V, then the batteries will become useless even though you have more than 95% of your capacity remaining.

Alkaline voltage drops proportional to charge pretty dramatically. It would be *nicer* if the voltage on NiMH was higher, but anything that demanded more than 1.2V out of alkaline batteries was pretty crappy.

Re:Eneloop is the way to go

[Junta]

Oh, I neglected to mention that while Alkaline voltage drops with capacity, NiMH has a pretty flat voltage relatively speaking. It stays right around 1.2V for most of it's capacity, then drops all of a sudden as it nears drained.

Most profit is on the retail side

[technosaurus]

Battery markups are not measured in percent, but multiples... 10X markup is not uncommon.

Demand for "batteries..."

[b0s0z0ku]

Demand for batteries is likely going up, driven by electric cars, computers, phones, etc. What's going down is demand for STANDARD batteries. Many devices have proprietary batteries of all different sizes, often inaccessible to the user.

Thing is, there's no good reason for it other than planned obsolescence. Take smartphones. Almost all of them use 3.7V LiIon batteries. Most of them are about 5 to 6 inches diagonally, with a specific height/width ratio. Time for an industry standard for swappable smartphone batteries. Imagine if you could just buy a battery at 7-11, pop the door, and swap it in when your phone's battery dies. Or maybe have a few different sizes, depending on screen size. Call then X, Y, and Z.

But no, this will never happen because throwing things away is a big profit center for sellers of e-trinkets.

Re:It was ripe for disruption a while ago

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I don't buy anything that's not rechargable

I feel the exact opposite - I love AA devices. I want batteries to be replaceable and standard. I have rechargeable AA's. The batteries are obviously user-replacable. I can keep a bunch of them charged for quick swaps. I don't need to figure out which device needed to be charged, I just put the AAs in the charger from wherever they came from. I don't need to move the devices to near an outlet to charge them. And, in an emergency, I can just get a bunch of non-rechargable AAs from the store to run devices.

I'm clearly a large enough use case that it's driving single use batteries into a niche market.

I'm not sure that's really true. While the number of rechargable devices has exploded, most of those are things are replacing power cords, not AAs.

Re:ray-o-vac.

[omnichad]

Energizer owns both Rayovac and Eveready.

Re:ray-o-vac.

[slyborg]

Thought you were wrong, but this basically just happened, the sale of Rayovac to Energizer Holdings just happened 3 months ago. Obvious move, Rayovacs were generally cheaper than either Energizers or Duracell, although I have had bad batches of batteries from them in the past. Now they'll be low quality batteries that cost just a tiny bit less than Energizers.

Guess it's Amazon Basics now.