Beware of 'shrinkflation,' inflation's devious cousin

I&#x27;ve been shopping on Instacart a lot during the pandemic and I&#x27;ve noticed a related phenomenon: packaging designed to make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos. It&#x27;s not necessarily a new thing, but the online photo aspect is somewhat novel because you don&#x27;t get to see the product in context.<p>For example, a jar of Jalapenos, product photo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;mprWr6R.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;mprWr6R.jpg</a><p>In reality, the jar&#x27;s cross-section isn&#x27;t circular as it appears, it&#x27;s an ellipse&#x2F;oval: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dXDUOR9.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dXDUOR9.png</a><p>Only the first photo was included in the item listing. When the groceries were delivered and I pulled out the jar, I was so surprised by the odd football-like shape that I couldn’t stop laughing for a few minutes at how well they’d fooled me.<p>Another common thing to see is familiar product packaging that is just “scaled down”. Everything about the packaging looks the same or very similar, but smaller - especially fonts. This deceives the eye into believing the product is much larger. I recently fell for this when shopping for some conditioner. The packaging is not exactly the same but close enough to fool me at a glance:<p>What I bought: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MdAuhS0.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MdAuhS0.png</a><p>What I expected: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MGxdD0d.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MGxdD0d.png</a><p>I&#x27;m inclined the believe this is on purpose because in real life, the fonts are way too small to read comfortably. If not trying to mislead, I would expect the packaging to be designed to be legible, right?<p>It&#x27;s especially frustrating because I usually would&#x27;ve just paid more for the larger size.

&gt; A study [1] by John T. Gourville and Jonathan J. Koehler analyzed data from the market for cereal and other sectors and found that consumers are much more gullible than classic theory predicts. They are more sensitive to changes in price than to changes in quantity. Companies, of course, have known this for years.<p>[1]: Gourville, John T., and Jonathan J. Koehler. &quot;Downsizing Price Increases: A Greater Sensitivity to Price Than Quantity in Consumer Markets.&quot; Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 04-042, March 2004.<p>Get the full text at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=559482" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=559482</a><p>NPR only linked to a citation page :(<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hbs.edu&#x2F;faculty&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;item.aspx?num=15756" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hbs.edu&#x2F;faculty&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;item.aspx?num=15756</a>

This happens even in non packages products, aka services.<p>I play rec. soccer, and have signed up for different leagues over the time.<p>Back in 2013-2015 for each game, the usual time was about 60 mins slot, with few minutes given for a mid game break and in between games team switch.<p>So, about 27 mins for a half, 5 mins a half game break, and a bit of a margin.<p>Over time this has been shrinking when it became 55mins, then 50, and now a partly 40mins for a whole game. You basically get 18 mins half.<p>To add to the injury each team now is stuffed with more players, so you have more subs and less play. it is annoying.<p>Usually it was only one crappy league doing this, but now the other ones are started to shrink game times, raise prices and so profits. So.... yeah, shrinkflation even in soccer games.

Because of the lack of true economic growth the central banks keep printing a copious amount of money and the market does everything it can to hide the inflation. Everything is becoming more expensive or worse in quality or amount. Everybody is richer but what the market is offering just keeps getting worse and its hiding the inflation.

I always price-compare on $&#x2F;oz or whatever other unit makes sense. Often this is even included on the shelf tag, but it&#x27;s easily calculated if not.<p>There&#x27;s often quite a difference depending on which container size you buy, and it&#x27;s not always the case that the largest container is the best value.<p>But would I notice that last week I was getting a 20oz package and this week it is a 19oz package? Not sure. I do remember this happening with candy bars as a kid. The price would be the same, but the bars would get smaller and smaller. Then suddenly the price would go up, the bar would be bigger, and the cycle would repeat.

20 years ago in Germany, many groceries were required to be sold in specific amounts (e.g. 500g or 1000g of cereals). This requirement was eventually lifted, probably all due to lobbying from the producers. Now you have 20 kinds of cereals on the shelf and they all cost the same, but if you look closely every one has a different weight (375g, 500g, 650g, ...). It&#x27;s crazy. In the end it just means that I need to buy two packages of one kind of cereal because there&#x27;s less in the package.

<i>&gt; The original Charmin roll of toilet paper, he says, had 650 sheets.</i><p>In Soviet Russia... (it is a kind of legend, I would not vouch for its truth value)<p>A roll of toilet paper was of 52 meters length. It was because the standard caliber in artillery was 120 mm, so in case of war the industry can be reoriented to fill cartridge case with a powder. When artillery moved to a 125 mm caliber the length of a roll of toiler paper increased to 54 meters.

Inflation measures aren’t stupid, they measure this too. If you sell a 15oz box for the same price you sold a 16oz box that will show up in the inflation numbers

<p><pre><code> &gt; If consumers were the rational creatures depicted in classic economic theory, they would notice shrinkflation. They would keep their eyes on the price per Cocoa Puff and not fall for gimmicks in how companies package those Cocoa Puffs. </code></pre> It’s not that consumers are not rational. Optimizing around 1 oz change of coco puffs isn’t really a good return on investment for many people.<p>Certainly people with limited budgets or fixed incomes might notice the change and adjust.<p>However if you are running to the store after dropping you kid off at soccer practice and only have 30 min to shop you care more about time than the small amount of money they are “up charging”.<p>Besides, people might be in-elastic with regards to their brands. Certainly I could switch to another cereal but if I want coco puffs I’ll pay the premium because lucky charms won’t substitute.

I commented similar before. Starting a couple of months ago, I noticed that four slices of the bread, which I buy every week and used to overflow an IKEA FÄRGKLAR plate, now fits perfectly within the circumference of the plate.<p>I also bought some Nongshim’s Neoguri ramen packets from Amazon a few days ago and received it yesterday. I paid slightly higher than I used to, but more importantly, I can tell that the size of the noodle in each pack has shrunk because I have left over packets that I bought from last year.

A “pint” of ice cream is only 14 oz now. A package of bacon used to be 16 oz but now it’s 9-12 oz. But in order to make it seem like a lot, they slice the bacon so thin, the pieces stretch and get ruined as you pull them from the package. Same goes for OJ.<p>For those things you can’t shrink, like eggs, they are over $6&#x2F;dozen in San Fran, I’ve seen some for $10&#x2F;dozen.

I’ve coined a term that describes a new form of inflation that I call “crapflation.” If you buy things on Amazon you often now pay the same (or even more) for the cheapest import garbage. Essentially stuff that would be in a dollar store.

Great thing for people to be aware of, but NPR didn&#x27;t mention the Fed and the policy of targeting inflation a single time, which is a shame.<p>For fans of shrinkflation, you should also enjoy &#x2F;r&#x2F;shrinkflation on Reddit.

Whenever I see &quot;new look, same great taste&quot;, it makes me wary of this. Perhaps the package was redesigned for purely aesthetic reasons, but in many cases it&#x27;s to cover for the fact that they shrunk the package.

This is a textbook example of short-term business thinking, and it&#x27;s especially dumb; besides using up packaging for no good reason, there&#x27;s a natural limit to how small you can make your packages for any product. Your customers might be idiots, but they&#x27;re not <i>infinitely</i> idiots.

I think that the pollution aspect needs to be considered: deceptively packaged products produce more disposable waste than products that are not deceptively packaged. Unfortunately, nobody that creates consumer products has to worry about the cost to the environment of discarding those products. That should change.

It&#x27;s a shame this doesn&#x27;t happen with cars.

There were price controls in the 1980s in Brazil, so producers changed their products so as to introduce a &quot;new&quot; product.<p>This never went away and now we have 90g chocolate bars (down from 200g) and you can find toilet paper rolls with as little as 10m.<p>Some supermarkets will give you the unit price to help you compare.

I&#x27;m waiting to see us come up with clever ways to shrinkflate food that is priced in weight (e.g. $6.99&#x2F;lb).<p>Perhaps we can create some new, arbitrary unit of weight will be created, like ib, Ib, llb, ld, etc. that looks like a typo and tricks my mind into thinking I am getting a deal on a pound (lb) of ground beef when I am actually buying less of it. Bonus points if the unit of weight is not constant, fluctuating week after week based on market conditions, maybe tied to some new digital currency.

When I can, I don&#x27;t look at prices, I only look at $&#x2F;unit.<p>Some stores (like WalMart and Costco) make this very easy, and I pick the cereal with the best $&#x2F;unit price.

Gatorade did this a while back, too, going from 32oz to 28oz (IIRC) under the guise of a thinner-at-the-middle bottle that was more sporty looking.

Hmmm, I mean, I&#x27;ve got room for some cereal serving shrinkage. Let&#x27;s see how this goes.<p>(Smirks in ginormous 40 oz. bag of Malt-O Meal Cocoa Dyno-Bites)

We’re in a unique position to track this effectively as consumers. We have the tools, the data, etc. It just needs a bit of impetus, which is a big ask, I know. But tracking product price per day unit should be doable as well as standard sold package sizes for brand products.

Well, you either have to take care to check each package size or you could, you know, maybe make sure the food chains label the cost of product per standard unit of weight.<p>But I guess this would be too much - air quotes - <i>re-gyu-lay-tion</i> for the US.

Several soft drink companies have been trying to do this, with varying levels of success. It&#x27;s easy to buy a 20oz Coca Cola from a cooler at any grocery or convenience store. On the shelf? They&#x27;re 16.1 oz. A few years ago they tried to introduce a 1.5 liter bottle for the same price as the 2 liter bottle.<p>On the flip side, go to a Family Dollar and you&#x27;ll find tons of items that cost a buck in near-full size packaging with a fraction of the product you would expect from such a package.

In a rational society, this practice should be disallowed while keeping the same product name and price.<p>Either adjust the price accordingly, or be forced to put a big red sign with something like &quot;Now with 10% less content (compared to before DD&#x2F;MM&#x2F;YY)&quot;.<p>Even better, products should have their key content-size metric on the box, very visible, normalized by the price. E.g. XX&#x2F;ounce.<p>If the retailer makes a discount or changes the price, they should add a label with their changed price YY&#x2F;ounce.

Grocery store pricing is messed up to begin with. Anyone who is price-conscious has to evaluate based on price per weight or something similar in the first place.<p>Which can be difficult &#x2F; inconvenient!<p>Sometimes it&#x27;s the 10-pak that&#x27;s cheaper per unit. Sometimes it&#x27;s the 20-pak. Different products may not be directly comparable. Different varieties of the same product category might appear at two or three places in the same store, not counting end-caps.

I remember reading and seeing on TV the exact same thing during 2008&#x2F;9. But back then we had economic deflation, not inflation. Back then, people and business were running out of money.<p>Today, we have inflation, we have plenty of money, but we&#x27;re running out of raw materials.

We had a similar process in the Middle Ages - the amount of bread in a loaf would varied while the price remained the same. Of course nowadays the price rises as well as the product shrinking.

I hesitate to say this, but I <i>thought</i> there was something different about the Charmin that I&#x27;d purchased recently.

It&#x27;s the Seventies all over again. Shrinkflation was rampant.

You can&#x27;t buy a 5 Pound bag of sugar because of this.

38 ziplock gallon bags on the costco box...used to be 60.

I&#x27;ve appreciated how shrinkflation has brought serving sizes down from &#x27;American&#x27; back to &#x27;Reasonable.&#x27;

The value of money decreases as a designed function of our current economic system. This means companies must increase profits to maintain or stay ahead. This means companies have two options. It does not matter if this is during an increased period of inflation or during more &quot;stable&quot; economic times, profits must always increase because inflation is always there, the difference is the rate at which money inflates.<p>Option 1: They keep the amount and increase price. This makes consumers mad and prices consumers out of the market.<p>Option 2: Shrink the amount of product for sale. Consumers are less aware and won&#x27;t get upset as easily. Consumers get less, but this also ensures that consumers still can get anything at all and not be priced out.<p>This system is flawed to its core. No form of money has survived it. Thankfully, Bitcoin exists now and is the most sound form of hard money the world has ever seen. This is the system I participate in.

I wonder if CPI adjusts for this.<p>I’m betting not.

At an even more macro level outside of momentary inflation, this feels like a great averaging of economies.<p>The US economy led the world in the post war period until the mid-2000s. Our potion sizes were internationally known to be much larger. (We were sometimes derided for the <i>Big Gulp</i>.)<p>Now we&#x27;re approaching European and Asian sized cereal boxes. Tiny, less expensive cars are popular. More people are renters...<p>The wealth and low hanging fruit are draining out of the US and onto the rest of the world.<p>It&#x27;s fascinating to watch. A lot of people don&#x27;t seem to notice.

Just a joke, but at least General Mills isn&#x27;t associated with non consensually &quot;shrinking&quot; my penis via unnecessary circumcision...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;John_Harvey_Kellogg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;John_Harvey_Kellogg</a>

This has also been happening in the iOS ecosystem.<p>I have had a few iPads over the past 10 years, and most of the usable useful apps that I used to use are now unavailable due to killed backwards compatibility.<p>Or, if they are usable, most have been replaced by subscription service based versions (which would never make sense to purchase for tasks I do so infrequently).<p>I miss the early days of iOS and all the simple apps released for a $1 that did one thing well and ignored feature bloat. Those days are gone.<p>Hopefully we are at a stage now where apps made today will run for a 100 years…<p>Actually, that would be a good wager: at what year will an iOS version be released wherein apps that are subsequently released will be available to mankind, without update, for 100 years.