Confession: I like shrinkflation
I’ve been noticing food shrinkflation a lot here in Belgium lately. Smaller soda cans, biscuit packet counts going down, 125g becoming 115g etc.
And honestly, to choose between the same size package getting more expensive vs less of it… I’ll take the latter. It’s reducing consumption. Which is great as a whole, but also selfishly if I’m buying a pack of crisps and I get to eat less of it … great.
Not so great on essentials obviously but those aren’t really hit by shrinkflation as much as snacks, etc.
Okay, that’s it. I do want to stress that I don’t like paying more for the same shit, but on a practical level, if I do, I much rather get less for the same price than have to spend more and be stuck getting the same quantity.
Especially if it’s junk food… I’ve even found myself disliking the old soda can sizes when I come across them. Having gotten used to the new ones, the old ones are straight up too much.
I would agree that having smaller snack sizes is good. Someone please call me when they make two 100-Calorie Fast Breaks instead of one 220-Calorie and I will be at the store buying all of them.
The deception is the problem.
Make the package smaller to fit. Don't keep the package the same size and put in a plastic block to fill space. Don't dilute the detergent with water and advertise 30% more volume that cleans 20% fewer loads. Don't make your bottles taller and thinner.
Tall bottles are so annoying. I have shelves somebody built into the wall in the 80's. If this trend continues I'm gonna have to find a new place to put my cleaning supplies, which will be quite annoying.
Keep the bottles that fit. Pour your new cleaning supplies into the old cleaning supply bottles.
I buy 5 liters of white vinegar at a time, but keep my old 500ml spray bottle and just refill it.
This is certainly a hot take lol. I'm in agreement with DeaconBlue that it's the deception which is the issue. I doubt we're going to see a day though where companies advertise "Now 15% smaller!" though. Most people aren't really aware of it I find.
It's also kind of inaccurate, or maybe Belgium has been lucky so far? In the US it's certainly not portions getting smaller but not more expensive, it's portions getting smaller AND more expensive. Hence the flation part of shrinkflation.
Shrinkflation has always referred to the shrinking size of products as long as I can remember. But nobody's saying they can't inflate the prices at the same time. The added prices are pretty likely greedflation, in any case.
As far as I know, shrinkflation means keeping the same price tags (adjusted for inflation might be included) despite selling less product.
Effectively making you pay more money per actual amount of product.
That’s how I always read it.
Basically taking $1/100g and turning it into $1/80g
I Norway, bags of crisps/chips (the thin, crunchy potato flakes) have started being advertised as "smaller bag, same amount!"
They're pandering to those that have long said there is an unreasonable amount of empty space in those bags. And that empty space has increased over the years.
Just the other week I checked the amount of contents, and some of them are down to 200g per bag. Those same brands and flavourings were 350g just a few years back, and 250 juat last year as far as I can remember.
I read an incredible article on this subject (in French) about this subject. Here are some interesting translated quotes:
Like you said, most companies won't advertise smaller packaging nor admit on their own that they have reduced their formats and explain why. Since it is a deceptive practice, that's when the government should do something about it. However, some company will come forward:
Did you know that Brazil made it compulsory to show the change directly on the product?
It's good to see that it's not all just super deceptive was pretty much my original thinking! The Brazilian law is pretty much perfect and something I wish would be the standard.
Even putting it on a website, while transparent, I'm probably not going to notice as I don't really go to the companu website for 90% of the things I buy from a grocery store.
We've been lucky in Belgium; I haven't seen much outright deception. I have seen some outrageous shit being posted, but here's it's been pretty straightforward: Smaller cans, smaller bags, smaller portions. Things like Twix being sold in singles now. "Slice packs" of ham coming in packs of 4 instead of 6-8.
It's obvious when you shop often enough, especially because not all brands do it at the same time so you see the old style and the new style next to each other and it's extremely noticeable. I haven't felt deceived ever, when shopping here.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat!!!! Single Twix? This is my ideal serving size! Over here, it seems like our options are "normal size" (2-packs of Twix, 3 Reese's, etc.) or "king size" (4-packs of Twix, double-packs of chocolate bars, etc.).
It's really refreshing to see manufacturers go in the opposite direction and offer lighter, smaller portion sizes for candy. I love it. (Obviously there's something to be said about costs and packaging materials, but. Considering serving size in a vacuum, I'm all for this.)
I think he's saying that shrinkflation is a nice limiting factor for intake. Consider how he talks about junk food, for example: the smaller can sizes habituated him to a healthier serving size, and the old cans now feel like too much.
It doesn't really reduce consumption, though, unless you're only buying single-serving packages. And worse, it usually also increases the consumption of the packaging that the items are sold in, further damaging our environment.
Big business is not there to help you out; shrinkflation only helps to improve their bottom line. If they could fill those containers with dirt and you'd still buy it, they wouldn't even think twice about doing it.
The packaging bothers me the most. I noticed contact solution drop from, I think, 340 mL to 300 mL but the plastic bottle remained the same size. That's, what, an extra bottle needed every 10ish bottles?
Not huge on its own, but × millions of contact wearers, it starts adding up. Such an infuriating contrast to measures to reduce plastic use.
For certain impulse-purchases like junk food and soda, I think it might serve to shift consumption towards better alternatives if serving sizes are reduced. If the 7-11 ridiculous sized sodas were made smaller, it would be of everyones benefit. This is, of course, an unintentional benefit of greed and only applies to certain foods (my 5kg bag of potatoes now only weighing 4kg has no such benefit).
But for single-serving packages the difference in consumption is negligible. If a soda bottle goes from 500ml to 480ml, the difference in calories is practically the margin of error. In the meanwhile they're likely using the exact same blanks to make those smaller bottles so the environmental impact is still the same as it ever was. Fountain sodas, on the other hand, have always been such a high margin sales item that they haven't really needed to be 'shrinkflated'. The difference in price between one size cup to the next is also fairly negligible.
Reducing consumption is a good thing, for sure, but Shrinkflation is hardly a driving force for it. If your goal is to reduce personal consumption, then you have to buck up and actually make the choice to consume less.
lol yup there's a reason thar the soda machine is self-serve at a lot of fast food places. You lose more in margin from having a staffer need to fill dine-in drinks than by the people who will sit and refill their half gallon cup for free for hours.
I know I keep bringing up cans but they've gone down from 330ml to 250ml, and we're seeing "fridge packs" as well now which are 100ml/can. This is a huge difference. Nevermind the calories (I stick to zero-cal), I've noticed how uncomfortable it feels to drink the whole thing now.
With that said, even for things that go down ~10-15mg/ml, think about how significant that is for the population as a whole. If we're talking about, like, billions of packs. Sure, some amount of people will just buy more to consume the same or more… but on average, consumption goes way down.
This is exactly how I feel about sweets! I adore gummy candy, but... I don't want a big bag of them. I want to have like... 1-2 gummies per day, max. But, I don't have the self-control to pace out a full bag over 2 weeks? I'll inevitably eat too many in one sitting and make myself sick. Sure, manufacturers can write "share size" on their packaging, but... they must know full well that most of these bags aren't being shared. :v
Like you, I prefer paying the same for less when it comes to treats. Like, to take the logic to its extreme, I know that technically I could buy a huge bag of gummy candy right from a distributor for dirt cheap $/volume ratio. But, for sweets, I don't want to maximize the amount I get? That's dangerous! Instead, I want to minimize the portion size, and really emphasize to my brain that this is a little treat.
What I want most, though, is to bring back bulk bins at grocery stores. I liked being able to pick out a tiny tiny portion of exactly what I wanted for 50¢. (I was one of those bastards who would pick only my favorites from the Quality Street bins -- sorry to anyone else in my area who liked the pink/red/orange ones! The fudgy ones and the cremey ones are so tasty.)
COVID leading all the grocery stores round here to tape down their bulk sections then never bring them back is a quiet little loss that I'll always miss. Gas station gummy bins with their little plastic tongs, and their 5¢ small gummy/25¢ big gummy prices, and the honour system of trusting the person's count of what they picked... it all feels especially nostalgic to me. But, the bins seem to have all but disappeared. A relic of a softer time. :(
Hopefully I can live near a Bulk Barn one day!
((Side note: Does my post make sense from a regional perspective? How much of what I've written is specific to Canada?))
EDIT: Wowza, some of the comments here are really quite mean to OP. Please try to interpret @Adys' post charitably? I don't think they're saying that that they fully endorse the practice of shrinkflation 100% -- it's more that they've noticed an unintended side effect of shrinkflation that they feel improves their consumption habits. But, some of the responses really feel fixated on the title, rather than the body of the post... :(
You don't have pick'n'mix anymore? Oh you poor thing.
I saw it as a sign of public health and safety being good again once the pick'n'mix were becoming available in all shops again here.
No!!! It's a tragedy. All prepackaged bags, all huge in portion size, all way too much money.
I'm glad to know that it's just a local thing, though? Maybe I'll have to go on a road trip one day on a hunt to find a gas station with pick'n'mix bins. :3
I almost definitely see an internet search for "pick'n'mix near me" in your future. Results hazy, though.
Might also try searching for the term "bulk bins".
Desiring smaller portions isn’t much of a hot take. Accepting that you’re paying extra for the privilege is a…special line of thinking.
But you understand that inflation is largely unavoidable, right?
In many cases, inflation isn't just the CEO of whatever saying "you know what, let's raise our prices by 30% because I'm bored and want a bonus", but rather "our COGS have increased by 9% YOY for the past three years, let's raise prices by slightly more to catch up".
If I have to choose between paying more for the same amount, or paying the same for less, I will take the latter. And I think the latter has a much more positive effect on consumerism and consumption as a whole => Of what gets shrinkflated the most, I consume a little less, and the population as a whole consumes tons less.
Recent inflation has largely been the result of corporate greed, actually.
Source for such an absurd claim in the context of COVID, Brexit, and an active war?
You'll find many sources. You will also find many sources refuting them. Depends if you're the sort that listens to corporate PR about why they were totally justified raising prices. Considering how much you love shrinkflation, you're welcome to buy their lines about it.
Profits are up, stock buybacks are in vogue again, but remind me about how the companies are suffering and massive price increases was their only savior from the evil COVID and the far off war that they're totally not profiteering from massively.
Y'all are both being really uncharitable to each other. Accusing @Adys of "buying corporate PR" because they made a thread about liking the fact that they're consuming less junk food is... not a friendly way to interact. (To be fair, "absurd claim" was a pretty confrontational way for them to reply, too.)
FWIW, we (somewhat recently) had a discussion on Tildes about this very topic (greedflation).
According to that discussion, profits weren't actually up as you say (at least in Canada), but instead remained stable. The conclusion from the article was that prices were increased to maintain profits, passing the effects of inflation onto consumers, which seems to be @Adys's take as well.
But, if that article was some sort of spin with cherry-picked data, as you suggest, then I'd have to re-evaluate what I know...
You're right, frankly the very title itself pissed me off and I no longer have any interest engaging in this conversation.
It's not a source if it's just somebody with a hypothesis, any more than a million other random things i can say in my backyard, that range from "chemtrails are making the frogs gay" to "birds aren't real".
Nor do I categorize the head of PR at Nestlé explaining that "actually we're shrinkflating because we love our customers so much" as a "source".
"Recent inflation has largely been the result of corporate greed" is … I don't know how to put it. Energy prices going up isn't "corporate greed", and this is the sort of stuff that affects the entire supply chain. Rents going up, less VC money floating around = less extravagant play money for corps = more direct focus on profits.
Brexit has had a direct impact on prices. We've felt it, over here, and you can draw direct parallels. I am not particularly price sensitive and I have absolutely stopped ordering from british outlets because of the price hikes.
The war might be "far off" for you but here, it is not. And we feel the effects; In refugees, government priorities; new people on the job market; added costs for anything touching Russia; etc.
And COVID is the fun one. It's disrupted a lot of things, accelerated a lot of others. Sure, you have companies and politicians alike taking all kinds of weird decisions and bullshitting their way saying "oh it's because of covid". But the other two points have squeezed bottom lines a lot, and Covid has made companies radically change business models or work models. This, in turn, has created a lot of sudden waste in companies which means the costs of goods increase… which inflates things further.
I dunno where you live (I'm guessing the Other Continent given that you refer to a "far off war"), but over here, if you walk around the city and pay attention, you really notice the effects of all three of those. You see all the spaces being closed, sold, renovated; the businesses disappearing and reappearing; the sudden spike in co-working space. You pay attention to ads and you see how marketing budgets have changed.
Then you can also pay attention to bankruptcies. Here's some recent examples:
And those aren't "corporate greed", you see; this is what happens when you can't keep up. And you need to understand that one business going bankrupt has downstream effects as well. I network quite a bit, and I know a decent amount of people who are in deep financial trouble because a few of their clients or customers didn't pay due to bankruptcy, which in turn was from rising costs… and now those people have the potential to go bankrupt as well.
So, I maintain the "absurd statement". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that it's business-as-usual today when, yknow, (gestures at the past 4 years) is an extraordinary one.
Nope, nope, nope I am not fucking okay with it. It's bullshit, they should be forced to show different sizes of shit, and some stuff I have to calculate to get actually unit per price.
Look people say Americans have fallen out of love with ice cream, I can tell you I still like it, I just won't buy less than a pint for thr same price because they shrunk the size.
Where I live, price per comparable unit was mandated by law some years back.
All price tags now have the actual price in a bigger font, then the price per 100 grams, 1 litre, per wash (for fabric detergents using the manufacturer's instruction), per meter (toilet paper), or whatever else makes the most sense.
Making it very easy to not only compare similar products, but also seeing that per comparable unit, you're paying much more than before.
The amount of product has maybe shrunk down from an unhealthily large size, but the price has still gone way up for the adjusted amount of product.
Hm, after thinking about it more the take kinda makes sense. Processed food tends to be priced per bag, produce tends to be priced per pound or kg. “Shrinkflation” would disproportionately affect unhealthy food. Your wallet suffers, but your body rejoices, I suppose.
That being said if there is “shrinkflation” part of the point would be to abuse an information asymmetry, which is actual anti-consumer behavior as opposed to the litany of normal things a company can do which are accused of being “anti-consumer”, like raise prices transparently.
Meat still priced per lb, but the cuts getting weirder and weirder sizes trying to make 0.8 lb of steak look like a full lb. Like a porterhouse that looks huge from a distance but you get close and it's barely a cm thick.
Packaged bacon is starting to come in 12oz packages instead of 16 oz. I've seen this with some pastas too.
The problem now is Dinkflation, dual-income-no-kids-flation
Everything is made for couples and up, I buy goods in serving sizes that are too big and it costs too much because I'm buying for 2 or more when I don't want to.
The one nasty downside to women entering the workforce as equals is that now everyone is expected to have a full time job where before only half the working age people were expected to.
It is a very good thing that the workforce is no longer fully male-dominated.... but this is not really sustainable. Demanding 2 incomes to sustain a small family is how you get kids raised by daycare and not their parents.
That's not a downside to some. I would argue that's the intended effect. If you keep the poors unable to properly parent you can teach whatever lies you want to their children. Or sell whatever microtransactions, get the kid hooked on gambling young.
It's mindboggling how brazen they are. Taking candy from a baby is supposed to be an insult!
Is this a US thing? I haven't noticed that where I am.
I can understand on single service packets like bottles or cans of drinks. But a packet offering multiple servings, ie, biscuits, it's just annoying to then buy more packets to achieve the same amount of product that I want.
Seems like a more accurate title is that you like one of the effects of shrinkflation, not shrinkflation itself.
Or, in other words, you like the shrink but not the 'flation.
What? It it's less but costs the same, it's more expensive.
I know how money works, yes :)
My point, as I said elsethread, is that with inflation being mostly unavoidable, reducing consumption for the same price is, to me, a preferrable alternative to paying more for the same consumption. On an individual level, it's preferrable because it doesn't hit the wallet as hard and reduces luxury consumption. And in a society that consumes too much as a whole, that is probably a net good because of the reduced demand.
For the soda example: You don't count your soda consumption in milliliters, you count it in cans. If you're having a party, you might buy 24 cans. Now, for the same price, with can size switching from 330ml to 250ml, you're getting almost two liters (!!!) of coke less. But it's unlikely that you'd be buying 32 cans instead of 24 to make up for it. Consumption has been reduced.
Relevant article on this exact thing, at the operational level: https://www.modernretail.co/operations/shrinkflation-is-boosting-coca-colas-bottom-line/
I hadn't really thought about it this way but now, especially as I'm getting back to being Super-Rodney health-wise, this makes me rather happy.
It's a good positive outlook.
I've always been check value by weight so for staples long may that continue, but in terms of the not so healthy stuff this outlook is the bomb.
Thanks. :)
Am I the only one who saw a confession about liking shrinkflation and thought they were referring to something... else? Something almost certainly nsfw?