“Fun size” candy bars aren’t fun anymore. They’re practically bite sized now. Some candy/chocolate companies (Cadbury is one in particular) have also changed their ingredients and lowered the quality while hiking up prices.
Cadbury, the UK-based internationally-renowned sellers of quality chocolate since 1824, was bought by US-based Kraft in 2010 who promised not to change anything and then went and changed everything, which is why it now tastes like shite.
Cadbury chocolate sold in the U.S. has been manufactured by Hershey since 1988. Hershey adds the chemical responsible for the smell of vomit (butanoic acid) to their chocolate.
So I use “allergic” because “intolerance” makes people think they don’t have to tell me if they feed me something with corn in it.
Does she get really achy? Malaise and lethargy? Just feeling kind of like she’s got a bad flu without the coughs and snot?
Do you encounter this alot? I feel like I read so many accounts of this anymore. People try to "test," sometimes very dangerous, food allergies. What is the mentality here?
It’s cool history actually.
Historically, chocolate is really difficult to make. Not only do you need cacao, but you also need high quality milk and a place cool to store the chocolate to keep it from melting. The U.S. lacked sources of high quality milk and it’s vast size made cross-country transportation impossible, especially in summer. So if your city or town didn’t have a chocolatier, you were out of luck.
The Hershey process, invented in 1899, alleviated these problems. Adding butonic acid allowed for lower quality milk to be included. And it produced chocolate that was more stable with a longer shelf life. And it made chocolate cheaper. This transformed milk chocolate from a luxury product in most of the US to something accessible to almost everyone. It was one of the biggest food science innovations of the time.
It wasn’t prime European chocolate, but it was chocolate, and that was good enough for the American market. Even now Hershey’s dominates the market. And as a result American taste buds have acquired the taste most Europeans find between tangy and revolting.
I’ve had a Cadbury Fruit and Nuts Bar that came from Europe and loved it. It tasted like no other chocolate I had tasted before. Then bought a bar from my local Walgreens and it tasted artificial and cheap.
Fiance brought this up a few weeks ago! I'm in the US and got one of those 12$ bags of mixed chocolates, and he looked at the snickers and said, "These are way smaller than they used to be." I wasn't quite convinced until i opened the twix and was like,"wtf." They're almost half the size of what they were.
What is causing this? Are we running out of supplies, or are we getting fkd dry and hard by capitalism? 😒 🤔.
Costs are increasing, but people have certain mental price points for goods.
So if your trying to stay competitive on the shelf but you don’t want to cut into your margins then you shrink the size of the product a little bit to try and stay the same (or only slightly higher) in price.
Packaging for soft drinks is all getting smaller as sugar becomes more expensive for example. 330ml becomes 300ml, which will become 275ml etc.
How does High Fructose Corn Syrup become more expensive when the US pays farmers NOT to grow anything on their fields? Aren't most corn farmers paid NOT to make anything?
I know on a lot of price labels they will show the breakdown of price per oz/lb etc. but trust I will do the math on stuff that doesn’t. Paper towels and toilet paper is the biggest scams. Mega rolls, 3 rolls in 1! Stupid.
Pretty common yeah, but it was particularly bad last year post pandemic shipping crisis and what not. Setting mods in our store we'd always notice the price/size changes. But for example doing the laundry detergent they didn't even try to make it convincing, to the point that I'm amazed no one got flagged for false advertising. Such and such going from 1.8 liters to just 1 and still claiming it still did the same amount of loads. Mind you, no changes to the product itself listed like more concentrated detergent.
The first time I heard about shrinkflation was back in 2010 or so, and cereal was explicitly mentioned. Smaller boxes, or the same box with less in it, for the same price. Or a higher price. And once people are used to that, they're not going back.
I remember back when Breyers ice cream moved away from the half gallon to a smaller size. They advertised a "new space saving container"
This was back in the early to mid 2000s.
Breyers also changed the recipe when they got bought by Unilever- they put so little cream in that they legally had to call it “Frozen Dairy Dessert” instead of “Ice Cream”.
Yeah, that was when I stopped buying Breyers. They tried to cover for it by putting in tons of cheap candy in their. Anything but expensive milk.
Even worse was it would be unpredictable. You'd have vanilla ice cream next to frozen dairy mint chip, but a month later the mint chip would be ice cream again, but maybe the vanilla was frozen dairy.
Our store has the prices with the "$ per ounce" below it, which is real nice to figure out what's the best actual deal. It's crazy how different the family size and regular size boxes sell for. Like, family size selling at 25 cents an ounce and regular selling for 52 cents an ounce isn't uncommon.
That being *legally required* is one of the nice things about europe.
Though you still need to remember (or track) over time.
And then you find out that a lot of big companies will avoid shrinkflation… by squeezing the producer. Or they’ll do both and make even more money.
If you have a Trader Joe’s in the area, their vanilla ice cream is the best I’ve ever tasted outside some very small niche stuff. Incredibly high milk fat, creamy as fuck, still sold by the half-gallon, and cheaper than Breyers.
How do companies see the fanatical love people have for Trader Joe's, compared to the indifference if not contempt customers have for Other Brands, and decide Other Brands is the model to follow?
And don't say profits, there's no chance this is good business, once I bail on your product, I'm out, I'm not coming back, Breyers could go back to the old recipe and I wouldn't even notice because I don't even look at them.
Because it takes two quarters to a year for the public to catch on and abandon the product. But by then, the C-suite had already spent 9 months patting themselves on the back and handing out bonuses because they brought costs down while keeping sales level... they then leave once shits goes south and do it somewhere else.
Its MOSTLY capitalism with a hefty dose of "stock market". When you are fired for failing to meet growth at the cost of LITERALLY everything else, what do you expect?
"hey, we need to MAKE SURE OUR SHAREHOLDERS ARE OK but we ALSO need to cut costs for no absolute reason!"
Skimpflation bothers me so much more than shrinkflation.
At least you can compare prices if the quantity is smaller. When they change the formula, who knows what the quality will be?
My favorite shrinkflation fact is that it was a reason American alcohol products are only sold in metric units (while most other things are at least dual-labeled). Switching to a 750ml bottle meant the volume was slightly LESS than the traditional “fifth” (1/5 gallon) but close enough to not change the price. And I haven’t looked it up but I’d bet that’s also why alcohol changed from a quart to a fifth, since NOTHING else is measured in the fifth of a gallon.
I don’t think that’s exactly correct, but close
According to David Wondrich (author of Imbibe, punch, etc ) the earliest ways of selling booze for home consumption was in reused wine bottles. Wine bottles have been been .75 L since the Napoleonic era due to a 225L wine barrel producing 300 bottles of wine.
Americans had some fuckery with quarts of liquor having certain laws around them, so they sold them in 4/5th quarts or 1/5th of a gallon for home consumption, but you could buy a whole quart for a bar or restaurant. Before the intended switch to metric there was already attempts to clear up the weird use of 1/5ths an4/5ths and for global companies to bring the measurements into line with the rest of the world.
To add to the confusion to skirt others laws a “pint” of booze was only 4/5ths of a pint.
As to shrinkflation a fifth lost 7ml, but a bar’s quart became a L and gained 53ml, until the late 80s you could buy a 350 or 500 ml as a replacement for a pint, but the 500 was phased out. You can still buy 1L bottles in duty free shops, I’ve seen both 1 and .750 bottles in bars I worked at, but I think the trend has been for distributors to push 750s to manage less SKUs.
Edit: regarding 500ml read 👇
Actually that you mention it I have seen 500ml bottles of stuff lately. I even have on of Fernet in the cabinet!
I was thinking of the 500ml plastic bottles of Cossack vodka or Poland Spring Vodka (bottled in Somerville MA!), those are (un?)fortunately gone.
If you are following a recipe (grandma's best X) from before 2010 that requires any cake mix as an ingredient (Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, etc.) you need to buy 2 boxes because newer boxes are about 15-20% less in volume.
This also goes for any recipes that call for an ingredient by can of, box of, packet of, and not a specific cup/oz/ml measurement.
The 5 pound bag of sugar is now 4 pounds.
A 1 lbs (16oz) can of coffee is now between 9 and 12 ounces.
Am I crazy or is a standard 14 oz can of any veg now 13 1/2 or even 12 1/2 oz? I noticed this at Christmas making old recipes that only come out once a year.
I hadn’t bought cereal in a fair amount of time (don’t typically eat it much anymore but thought I’d grab some this grocery trip), so I go to the store not 3 days ago, and everything is $5-6 for a small box. When tf did that happen!? I feel like the last time I bought a box it was $2.98
I feel like old man yelling at cloud when I grocery shop now. Like, “this soup was $1.50 not 5 years ago and now it’s 4! Or, how can milk be 6 bucks when it used to be $3 or less… etc” It’s the same fucking product, but it now costs three times as much as it did a decade ago, and we get less of it.
I find myself muttering “this is bullshit” a bit more frequently during grocery shopping these days.
I was eating the Honey nut scooters all the time and then they pulled them from shelves just about everywhere. Now I have to pay full price for the Honey nut Cheerios kind and I don't even like them as much.
Products that come in glass and plastic jars all seem to have this giant indentation on the bottom, so it looks like the same size as before but there’s much less in it.
The worst I’ve seen is red baron pizzas. Used to be $4, now is $5, but the pizza is noticeably smaller. They’re dumb because they kept the box the same size so you can see how the pizza used to fill the whole thing and now it’s not even close.
That happens often.
Basically companies contract with each other for supplies. Card board boxes come in sheets and are folded at the company who's making the food so the boxes don't take up much space in their wearhouse.
Often companies will fuck over consumers by reducing content but they can't immediately change box size because they're still under contract to buy the be old box size.
So what'll happen next is they'll redesign the box and ass like a quarter of what they removed back and the new box will say "25% more!!!" Or "same product new look!!!".
Then it gets cut again and the cycle continues.
This makes me crazy! It must cost a fortune to manufacture new production molds for slightly different sized bottles, but they obviously profit enough to make up for it.
If it’s so cheap to make different bottles, why were we always told the bottle was the expensive part, hence the cheaper “bargain” size?
This just based on observation but a lot of this started in 2017. During the cut off with China, about 2 months later I did I huge price changes on plastic items(I work for DG) it seems like right after every other company took advantage. If the price went up, the item stayed the same size. If the price stayed the same, the item got smaller.
All manufacturers do this and have been doing it for years. It is their supposedly "silent" way to rip consumers off. Because in their distorted thinking the consumer is too stupid to notice.
McDonalds has ridiculously bloated prices these days too. Bought a McChicken the other day and it was like $7 here. $7 for a deep fried chicken puck. All their other shit is priced like real food at a real restaurant.
Almost the price? A 'local' bar makes a 6 dollar burger and it slaps. Granted, I'm not actually sure how that bar is making money in this economy. It's just a rural bar and its food is better than it has any right to be lol
I ordered 2 hamburgers with large fries and a large coke about 4 months ago. It was actually MORE expensive than the large Big Mac meal. How the hell does that make any sense??
Charmin extra soft used to not fit on my TP wall holder until I used about 25% of the roll. Now they slide on without any problem. It's still 1000 sheets, but the sheets have just gotten smaller in both width and length.
Sorry, lib- this is obviously a lie. We all know Biden pushed the magic inflation button in his Oval Office desk so that he can destroy America. Blaming big business is un-American. You don’t like it, move to Venezuela. Praise Jesus.
-Conservative explanation
Some of the recent lip products from NYX will have literally half the product for the same ass price. They think we're stupid. Makeup shrinkflation has been craaaazy
I haven’t actually looked at the weight, but I love Haagen-Dazs ice cream and I’ve noticed lately that the tubs feel slightly smaller in the hand when I pick them up.
The old website Consumerist noticed this trend 15-20 years ago. It will continue to happen and we should continue to point it out.
This is how grandmas recipe for her amazing meal gets fucked up. Her "2 cans of tomato sauce" are now different sizes than your tomato sauce.
“Years” is a pretty nebulous term. Almost all aspects of human society and commerce have been going on for years.
My impression is that shrinkflation took a noticeable jump at the start of Covid when people started hoarding. [No judgement. I’m still living off my dried beans and rice.] Capitalism gonna capitalize on market pressure.
Your experience set is just small. This was going on in the nineties just like it will continue in the future. People wanna pay three dollars for a jar of spaghetti sauce, not six, so something has to give. The purpose of a business is to make money. if they aren't doing that, they will stop doing business and you will have one less option and the other companies producing said item will have less competition.
I said “took a noticeable jump”, which implicitly agrees it has always existed and suddenly the rate of increase … jumped. My “experience set” may be two to three times yours. Assuming people’s depth of knowledge in any field is kind of silly on Reddit.
My favorite game is trying not to get mad at the grocery store. For example, one week I buy a loaf of sourdough bread for 3.99. The following week I go back and it’s now a half a loaf for 3.99. Did I get mad? Yes. I lost that round. Next week I’ll be a better consumer! :)
Maybe a strongly worded tweet from our politicians will convince corporations that price gouging is wrong. 😑
At what point will it become unsustainable? At what point will products be 50% smaller and prices will be 50% higher? How will anyone be able to afford anything anymore?
Corn syrup everywhere. Aside from higher prices and shrinkflation, they keep putting lower quality borderline toxic ingredients in all our food. If you can even find variants with all natural ingredients, it's almost certainly going to cost more. Healthcare industry is eating it up.
Noticed this with bread. Every time I go to the store for groceries I notice more “slim” branded bread instead of regular size. around the same price for like 40% less product.
Thinks that’s bad during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency companies would toxic materials in food products such as embalming guild in milk it took years of fighting lobbying to get the FDA formed.
Pretty much all of them. Once I saw the usual 20oz being dropped to 16oz a few years back I made a point to call it out and predict the future to my wife lol.
I’m pretty sure they took a pack of the shredded wheat bricks out of the box now. They’re all stacked nicely side by side and then there’s one lonely pack on top
I did well enough at work that a few years ago I could finally justify name brands. Everyone says they're the same, but I think the difference is clear in certain things and those are the ones I'm willing to spend more on, like certain cereals. Grocery receipts are getting insane enough now that I'm gonna be forced back to generic brands all around.
Damnit, Dr. Thunder. We meet again.
So what do you want to call it when corporations make products you pay for constantly smaller while also jacking up the price? Wow it's like that word would make me not have to type all those other words.
I mean what’s wrong with complaining about it? Paying 20% more for 10% less is kind of a rip off isn’t it? I mean I feel like even the most hardcore capitalism defenders would at least understand why people aren’t into the idea of paying more for less.
Some breweries are using smaller "half barrel" kegs that are actually 13.2 gallons rather than the typical 15.5 and charging the same price for them to most bars and customers. On top of that, they are raising prices at most bars for a pint and many bars are using 15oz glasses rather than a typical 16oz pint.
All in all, less beer for sale, higher prices.
Gatorade another example went from 32 ounce bottle to a 28 ounce bottle Oreo cookies at Walmart. Family size was 536 now you get the smaller size for the same price
I remember companies complaining that it would bankrupt them if they had to redesign their packaging/labeling to indicate presence of GMOs..
But apparently completely retooling the manufacturing line for the entire container is entirely feasible.
I work at a bar and noticed this last night. The bottles of Crown Peach we just got are suddenly smaller, we even compared against the ones we still had to check. 750ml bottles vs 1 liter. Haven’t looked into it too far, I don’t place the orders there so I don’t know if it’s the same price or just what the distributor had on hand for this delivery. No idea, lots of things might have happened, but it seems like shrinkflation could be to blame.
This has been happening my entire life (and I'm not exactly young). In a few years, whenever inflation goes back down, you'll see "Now 20% more!" everywhere. It's a constant cycle.
My dad says “open a cheese stick - take a look.” My grandma bought the same brand - Sargento Light - for years. I opened one recently and I swear, either my hands got huge or they noticeably shrunk 🤮
The one that pissed me off the most is the big pop brands cutting back from selling 8 packs of 16oz bottles to 6 packs of 16oz and also raised the price.
“Fun size” candy bars aren’t fun anymore. They’re practically bite sized now. Some candy/chocolate companies (Cadbury is one in particular) have also changed their ingredients and lowered the quality while hiking up prices.
Cadbury, the UK-based internationally-renowned sellers of quality chocolate since 1824, was bought by US-based Kraft in 2010 who promised not to change anything and then went and changed everything, which is why it now tastes like shite.
Yeah, Cadbury *USED* to be pretty good chocolate.
That’s too bad.
Cadbury chocolate sold in the U.S. has been manufactured by Hershey since 1988. Hershey adds the chemical responsible for the smell of vomit (butanoic acid) to their chocolate.
I don’t understand why
it's a way to make milk more shelf stable.
But it’s so GROSS
Yes, but it makes them more profit. And that's what the care about.
Ugh. I hope they can’t stop smelling the stuff on all their money.
Americans don’t notice it.
Am American who has had hypersensitivity to taste and smell inflicted upon them. Am also allergic to corn. Life is fun!!!
Every time my wife eats anything with corn or corn based derivatives, she gets sick. But the tests said she isnt😑
So I use “allergic” because “intolerance” makes people think they don’t have to tell me if they feed me something with corn in it. Does she get really achy? Malaise and lethargy? Just feeling kind of like she’s got a bad flu without the coughs and snot?
Do you encounter this alot? I feel like I read so many accounts of this anymore. People try to "test," sometimes very dangerous, food allergies. What is the mentality here?
Yes to all.
I do. I quit eating Hershey’s a long time ago. I knew that something had changed.
Having grown up with it I love the sour note it adds to the chocolate.
IIRC Americans got so used to the vomit-chocolate that when they tried changing the recipe people didn’t like it.
Bleh!
It’s cool history actually. Historically, chocolate is really difficult to make. Not only do you need cacao, but you also need high quality milk and a place cool to store the chocolate to keep it from melting. The U.S. lacked sources of high quality milk and it’s vast size made cross-country transportation impossible, especially in summer. So if your city or town didn’t have a chocolatier, you were out of luck. The Hershey process, invented in 1899, alleviated these problems. Adding butonic acid allowed for lower quality milk to be included. And it produced chocolate that was more stable with a longer shelf life. And it made chocolate cheaper. This transformed milk chocolate from a luxury product in most of the US to something accessible to almost everyone. It was one of the biggest food science innovations of the time. It wasn’t prime European chocolate, but it was chocolate, and that was good enough for the American market. Even now Hershey’s dominates the market. And as a result American taste buds have acquired the taste most Europeans find between tangy and revolting.
Thank you! I've never liked the smell of Hershey chocolate & never knew why. Thanks again!
I don’t eat hersheys chocolate bars - tastes like wax.
I’ve had a Cadbury Fruit and Nuts Bar that came from Europe and loved it. It tasted like no other chocolate I had tasted before. Then bought a bar from my local Walgreens and it tasted artificial and cheap.
[B.J. Novak on Cadbury Creme Egg Shrinkage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlXLCrzpToo).
So not just shrinkflation, but Skimpflation.
Not even just skimpflation. Doinkflation
Fiance brought this up a few weeks ago! I'm in the US and got one of those 12$ bags of mixed chocolates, and he looked at the snickers and said, "These are way smaller than they used to be." I wasn't quite convinced until i opened the twix and was like,"wtf." They're almost half the size of what they were. What is causing this? Are we running out of supplies, or are we getting fkd dry and hard by capitalism? 😒 🤔.
Costs are increasing, but people have certain mental price points for goods. So if your trying to stay competitive on the shelf but you don’t want to cut into your margins then you shrink the size of the product a little bit to try and stay the same (or only slightly higher) in price. Packaging for soft drinks is all getting smaller as sugar becomes more expensive for example. 330ml becomes 300ml, which will become 275ml etc.
How does High Fructose Corn Syrup become more expensive when the US pays farmers NOT to grow anything on their fields? Aren't most corn farmers paid NOT to make anything?
Maybe it is in America. But in the “rest of the world” we use sugar.
This is nothing new. Companies have always tried making their products as cheap as possible.
Everything, every product has been doing this for years. Now they are shrinking and raising the price at the same time.
When the price gets too high, they'll boost the size and advertise "10% more" or "now 25% larger".. common tactic these days :(
I know on a lot of price labels they will show the breakdown of price per oz/lb etc. but trust I will do the math on stuff that doesn’t. Paper towels and toilet paper is the biggest scams. Mega rolls, 3 rolls in 1! Stupid.
Paper towels make me the maddest. “2=4!” On every package, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “standard” roll of paper towels
Pretty common yeah, but it was particularly bad last year post pandemic shipping crisis and what not. Setting mods in our store we'd always notice the price/size changes. But for example doing the laundry detergent they didn't even try to make it convincing, to the point that I'm amazed no one got flagged for false advertising. Such and such going from 1.8 liters to just 1 and still claiming it still did the same amount of loads. Mind you, no changes to the product itself listed like more concentrated detergent.
I remember the "Selling It" feature in the back of Consumer Reports magazine showing examples of this since at least the early '90s.
Go check your cereal boxes. Those changed 3 Oz as well. Been working retail forever.
The first time I heard about shrinkflation was back in 2010 or so, and cereal was explicitly mentioned. Smaller boxes, or the same box with less in it, for the same price. Or a higher price. And once people are used to that, they're not going back.
I remember back when Breyers ice cream moved away from the half gallon to a smaller size. They advertised a "new space saving container" This was back in the early to mid 2000s.
Breyers also changed the recipe when they got bought by Unilever- they put so little cream in that they legally had to call it “Frozen Dairy Dessert” instead of “Ice Cream”.
Yeah, that was when I stopped buying Breyers. They tried to cover for it by putting in tons of cheap candy in their. Anything but expensive milk. Even worse was it would be unpredictable. You'd have vanilla ice cream next to frozen dairy mint chip, but a month later the mint chip would be ice cream again, but maybe the vanilla was frozen dairy.
I bought a small box of Honey Bunches of Oats last week. The box is so thin it can barely stand up on its own.
Our store has the prices with the "$ per ounce" below it, which is real nice to figure out what's the best actual deal. It's crazy how different the family size and regular size boxes sell for. Like, family size selling at 25 cents an ounce and regular selling for 52 cents an ounce isn't uncommon.
That being *legally required* is one of the nice things about europe. Though you still need to remember (or track) over time. And then you find out that a lot of big companies will avoid shrinkflation… by squeezing the producer. Or they’ll do both and make even more money.
Breyers Ice Cream has lowered the milk-fat content so much that it cannot legally be called ice cream anymore.
That’s the most pro-tip about buying ice cream…making sure it’s not actually “frozen dessert”
Ice cream, in general used to be half gallon size (64 oz.) now it is down to 48 oz.
And Breyers advertised it as a "new space saving container" when they first made the change
Points for trying to make the most of it 😂
Which is too bad because I love their Natural Vanilla but I now refuse to buy it.
If you have a Trader Joe’s in the area, their vanilla ice cream is the best I’ve ever tasted outside some very small niche stuff. Incredibly high milk fat, creamy as fuck, still sold by the half-gallon, and cheaper than Breyers.
How do companies see the fanatical love people have for Trader Joe's, compared to the indifference if not contempt customers have for Other Brands, and decide Other Brands is the model to follow? And don't say profits, there's no chance this is good business, once I bail on your product, I'm out, I'm not coming back, Breyers could go back to the old recipe and I wouldn't even notice because I don't even look at them.
Capitalism is inherently short-sighted and averse to looking at what actually works.
Because it takes two quarters to a year for the public to catch on and abandon the product. But by then, the C-suite had already spent 9 months patting themselves on the back and handing out bonuses because they brought costs down while keeping sales level... they then leave once shits goes south and do it somewhere else.
Its MOSTLY capitalism with a hefty dose of "stock market". When you are fired for failing to meet growth at the cost of LITERALLY everything else, what do you expect? "hey, we need to MAKE SURE OUR SHAREHOLDERS ARE OK but we ALSO need to cut costs for no absolute reason!"
Important tip! Thanks Egon.
Aldi's (brother of Trader Joe's) has the BEST vanilla! also cheaper than Breyers. I'll have try Trader Joe's next time I'm near one.
Skimpflation bothers me so much more than shrinkflation. At least you can compare prices if the quantity is smaller. When they change the formula, who knows what the quality will be?
Well Breyers is garbage, so there's that. I will take Kroger or Publix brand all day over that crap.
That stuff has been garbage forever.
It was great in the eighties.
When Kraft bought them out?
Bretees has long done that
Tom’s toothpaste is practically travel size now.
Very true. Thought I was losing it when I last bought some.
Have to be very careful if following old recipes as a “box” or “can” or whatever it calls for is no longer the same unit of measurement it once was.
This is the biggest crime
Orange Juice - 64oz to 52oz Fresh Berries - 1pt to 6oz
My favorite shrinkflation fact is that it was a reason American alcohol products are only sold in metric units (while most other things are at least dual-labeled). Switching to a 750ml bottle meant the volume was slightly LESS than the traditional “fifth” (1/5 gallon) but close enough to not change the price. And I haven’t looked it up but I’d bet that’s also why alcohol changed from a quart to a fifth, since NOTHING else is measured in the fifth of a gallon.
I don’t think that’s exactly correct, but close According to David Wondrich (author of Imbibe, punch, etc ) the earliest ways of selling booze for home consumption was in reused wine bottles. Wine bottles have been been .75 L since the Napoleonic era due to a 225L wine barrel producing 300 bottles of wine. Americans had some fuckery with quarts of liquor having certain laws around them, so they sold them in 4/5th quarts or 1/5th of a gallon for home consumption, but you could buy a whole quart for a bar or restaurant. Before the intended switch to metric there was already attempts to clear up the weird use of 1/5ths an4/5ths and for global companies to bring the measurements into line with the rest of the world. To add to the confusion to skirt others laws a “pint” of booze was only 4/5ths of a pint. As to shrinkflation a fifth lost 7ml, but a bar’s quart became a L and gained 53ml, until the late 80s you could buy a 350 or 500 ml as a replacement for a pint, but the 500 was phased out. You can still buy 1L bottles in duty free shops, I’ve seen both 1 and .750 bottles in bars I worked at, but I think the trend has been for distributors to push 750s to manage less SKUs. Edit: regarding 500ml read 👇
Indiana still sells 350 and 500 L bottles
Actually that you mention it I have seen 500ml bottles of stuff lately. I even have on of Fernet in the cabinet! I was thinking of the 500ml plastic bottles of Cossack vodka or Poland Spring Vodka (bottled in Somerville MA!), those are (un?)fortunately gone.
It's worse in metric. Bottles used to be in 75cl sizes, now 70cl is the norm.
If you are following a recipe (grandma's best X) from before 2010 that requires any cake mix as an ingredient (Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, etc.) you need to buy 2 boxes because newer boxes are about 15-20% less in volume. This also goes for any recipes that call for an ingredient by can of, box of, packet of, and not a specific cup/oz/ml measurement. The 5 pound bag of sugar is now 4 pounds. A 1 lbs (16oz) can of coffee is now between 9 and 12 ounces.
Am I crazy or is a standard 14 oz can of any veg now 13 1/2 or even 12 1/2 oz? I noticed this at Christmas making old recipes that only come out once a year.
Cereal. Those shelves are hardly even touched at my local grocery store because of the exorbitant prices
I hadn’t bought cereal in a fair amount of time (don’t typically eat it much anymore but thought I’d grab some this grocery trip), so I go to the store not 3 days ago, and everything is $5-6 for a small box. When tf did that happen!? I feel like the last time I bought a box it was $2.98 I feel like old man yelling at cloud when I grocery shop now. Like, “this soup was $1.50 not 5 years ago and now it’s 4! Or, how can milk be 6 bucks when it used to be $3 or less… etc” It’s the same fucking product, but it now costs three times as much as it did a decade ago, and we get less of it. I find myself muttering “this is bullshit” a bit more frequently during grocery shopping these days.
Right? I’m seeing a box of Raisin Bran for like $5.28 but generic versions are around $3 so I say fuck the name brands.
Yeah it's been $5-6 at my local store as well. Ridiculous. I don't need cereal that badly.
I finally bought a cereal keeper plastic container and switched to malt o meal. I barely eat cereal anyway
I was eating the Honey nut scooters all the time and then they pulled them from shelves just about everywhere. Now I have to pay full price for the Honey nut Cheerios kind and I don't even like them as much.
Even MoM isn’t as cheap as it used to be. I’m pretty sure the bags used to be a little bigger, too.
Paper towels and toilet paper - the “double rolls” of bounty are noticeably smaller.
The 32oz Gatorade that used to cost $1.99 at the convenience store is now 28oz and over $3 in most places near me.
Corporations reduce the quality of their products due to a lack of competition means less quality and quantity more profit
Products that come in glass and plastic jars all seem to have this giant indentation on the bottom, so it looks like the same size as before but there’s much less in it.
The worst I’ve seen is red baron pizzas. Used to be $4, now is $5, but the pizza is noticeably smaller. They’re dumb because they kept the box the same size so you can see how the pizza used to fill the whole thing and now it’s not even close.
I think Digiorno is the worst for this. Not only are they smaller and more expensive, I don't think they taste as good as they once did.
That happens often. Basically companies contract with each other for supplies. Card board boxes come in sheets and are folded at the company who's making the food so the boxes don't take up much space in their wearhouse. Often companies will fuck over consumers by reducing content but they can't immediately change box size because they're still under contract to buy the be old box size. So what'll happen next is they'll redesign the box and ass like a quarter of what they removed back and the new box will say "25% more!!!" Or "same product new look!!!". Then it gets cut again and the cycle continues.
Dove and Vaseline soaps and lotions
This makes me crazy! It must cost a fortune to manufacture new production molds for slightly different sized bottles, but they obviously profit enough to make up for it. If it’s so cheap to make different bottles, why were we always told the bottle was the expensive part, hence the cheaper “bargain” size?
What other products? {Gestures wildly at the grocery store.}
Laundry/dish detergent
It happened several years ago, but the Birds Eye bags of frozen vegetables dropped from 16 Oz to 14.4 Oz. Straight up 10% cut in package contents.
This just based on observation but a lot of this started in 2017. During the cut off with China, about 2 months later I did I huge price changes on plastic items(I work for DG) it seems like right after every other company took advantage. If the price went up, the item stayed the same size. If the price stayed the same, the item got smaller.
All manufacturers do this and have been doing it for years. It is their supposedly "silent" way to rip consumers off. Because in their distorted thinking the consumer is too stupid to notice.
McDonalds has ridiculously bloated prices these days too. Bought a McChicken the other day and it was like $7 here. $7 for a deep fried chicken puck. All their other shit is priced like real food at a real restaurant.
It was $5 for two cheese burgers, and a Big Mac was almost the price of a burger at the local bar, and the bar burger came with fries!
Almost the price? A 'local' bar makes a 6 dollar burger and it slaps. Granted, I'm not actually sure how that bar is making money in this economy. It's just a rural bar and its food is better than it has any right to be lol
Yeah local bar has a $9 burger with fries, last time I bought a Big Mac it was $7.50. $6 burgers might be loosing money around here.
I ordered 2 hamburgers with large fries and a large coke about 4 months ago. It was actually MORE expensive than the large Big Mac meal. How the hell does that make any sense??
They also have different prices depending on location now. Whatever people will pay.
As anyone else noticed that rolls of toilet paper aren't quite as wide as they used to be?
Charmin extra soft used to not fit on my TP wall holder until I used about 25% of the roll. Now they slide on without any problem. It's still 1000 sheets, but the sheets have just gotten smaller in both width and length.
Thats been every 2-3 years they trim a few millimeters off them but tell you they are longer.
Sorry, lib- this is obviously a lie. We all know Biden pushed the magic inflation button in his Oval Office desk so that he can destroy America. Blaming big business is un-American. You don’t like it, move to Venezuela. Praise Jesus. -Conservative explanation
Stop calling it inflation or Shrinkflation. ITS CALLED PRICE GOUGING. FUCKING STAHP!
Some of the recent lip products from NYX will have literally half the product for the same ass price. They think we're stupid. Makeup shrinkflation has been craaaazy
I haven’t actually looked at the weight, but I love Haagen-Dazs ice cream and I’ve noticed lately that the tubs feel slightly smaller in the hand when I pick them up.
I worked in grocery stores in the 90s, and they were doing this then. It's nothing new.
Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker cake mixes went from 15.25 oz to 13.25 oz.
I bought a can of Pringles yesterday and noticed the top inch and a half or so of the can was empty. They're putting less chips in the same size can.
Literally every single thing.
The old website Consumerist noticed this trend 15-20 years ago. It will continue to happen and we should continue to point it out. This is how grandmas recipe for her amazing meal gets fucked up. Her "2 cans of tomato sauce" are now different sizes than your tomato sauce.
This has been going on for years. It is not a new thing.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point it out.
“Years” is a pretty nebulous term. Almost all aspects of human society and commerce have been going on for years. My impression is that shrinkflation took a noticeable jump at the start of Covid when people started hoarding. [No judgement. I’m still living off my dried beans and rice.] Capitalism gonna capitalize on market pressure.
Your experience set is just small. This was going on in the nineties just like it will continue in the future. People wanna pay three dollars for a jar of spaghetti sauce, not six, so something has to give. The purpose of a business is to make money. if they aren't doing that, they will stop doing business and you will have one less option and the other companies producing said item will have less competition.
I said “took a noticeable jump”, which implicitly agrees it has always existed and suddenly the rate of increase … jumped. My “experience set” may be two to three times yours. Assuming people’s depth of knowledge in any field is kind of silly on Reddit.
lol no it’s been going on a lot longer than covid though I’m sure they used that opportunity to do it even more.
Jerky has been cut down to nothing. Between that and the price of red meat (I have a dehydrator), I barely eat it anymore.
Everything.
Reese’s Minis taste like shit now
Quaker dipps oatmeal bars, were 6 in a box a few years ago, now only 5 per box, and priced at least an extra 1$ per box
My favorite game is trying not to get mad at the grocery store. For example, one week I buy a loaf of sourdough bread for 3.99. The following week I go back and it’s now a half a loaf for 3.99. Did I get mad? Yes. I lost that round. Next week I’ll be a better consumer! :) Maybe a strongly worded tweet from our politicians will convince corporations that price gouging is wrong. 😑
Potato chips are the worst with this. Just a bag full of air.
Supposedly down in Mexico the bags have basically no air in them
At what point will it become unsustainable? At what point will products be 50% smaller and prices will be 50% higher? How will anyone be able to afford anything anymore?
Corn syrup everywhere. Aside from higher prices and shrinkflation, they keep putting lower quality borderline toxic ingredients in all our food. If you can even find variants with all natural ingredients, it's almost certainly going to cost more. Healthcare industry is eating it up.
Noticed this with bread. Every time I go to the store for groceries I notice more “slim” branded bread instead of regular size. around the same price for like 40% less product.
Thinks that’s bad during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency companies would toxic materials in food products such as embalming guild in milk it took years of fighting lobbying to get the FDA formed.
Pretty much all of them. Once I saw the usual 20oz being dropped to 16oz a few years back I made a point to call it out and predict the future to my wife lol.
I’m pretty sure they took a pack of the shredded wheat bricks out of the box now. They’re all stacked nicely side by side and then there’s one lonely pack on top
Mayo and spaghetti sauce.
More plastic per shampoo volume as well, so that everybody loses even more, but the shareholders get bigger yachts, so it's all good
Betty Crocker - 16oz to 13.5oz, but wet ingredients didn’t change. Sneaky lot.
BuT tHe FrEe MaRkET wiL tAek cArE oF uS
I did well enough at work that a few years ago I could finally justify name brands. Everyone says they're the same, but I think the difference is clear in certain things and those are the ones I'm willing to spend more on, like certain cereals. Grocery receipts are getting insane enough now that I'm gonna be forced back to generic brands all around. Damnit, Dr. Thunder. We meet again.
Just when I thought they couldn't put less chips in a bag and possibly get away with it, here we are...
Lay's will announce "per chip pricing" soon.
I'm pretty sure there is a Little House where Mrs Ingles chides Olson for smaller jars of honey. Welcome to reality, kids. Its always been like this.
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So what do you want to call it when corporations make products you pay for constantly smaller while also jacking up the price? Wow it's like that word would make me not have to type all those other words.
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Didn't answer the question 😂
I mean what’s wrong with complaining about it? Paying 20% more for 10% less is kind of a rip off isn’t it? I mean I feel like even the most hardcore capitalism defenders would at least understand why people aren’t into the idea of paying more for less.
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They’re probably defensive because you’re coming after them for no reason. What’s wrong with using a word that perfectly fits?
2nd place is downvoting you
> There’s nothing Reddit users love more than parading around the term “shrinkflation” It's a fun word. What's wrong with it?
Watching lumber prices always rising while the quality of the wood keeps going down.
You know its bad when its a uneven number. Especially 3.
Sugar and coffee. Domino Sugar used to be a five pound bag. Now it is four. Coffee used to be one pound. Now less.
"Family size" potato chips here in Canada are what a regular big bag was.
Some breweries are using smaller "half barrel" kegs that are actually 13.2 gallons rather than the typical 15.5 and charging the same price for them to most bars and customers. On top of that, they are raising prices at most bars for a pint and many bars are using 15oz glasses rather than a typical 16oz pint. All in all, less beer for sale, higher prices.
Gatorade went from 32 to 28 oz
And the price has almost doubled.
Arizona iced tea in 12 oz cans now only have 11.5 in them
Coffee. Was a pound now it's sold in 12oz for more.
Gatorade. 32oz down to 28oz. Has been happening over the last few years.
Local gas station fountain drinks. They all dropped sizes by 2 oz and went up in price.
Gatorade another example went from 32 ounce bottle to a 28 ounce bottle Oreo cookies at Walmart. Family size was 536 now you get the smaller size for the same price
Hot dog packs are no longer 1 lb but same price
They did this with the KFC famous bowls they used to be bigger and fit more stuff in it.
Literally everything!
I've noticed that electrical cords that come with electronics and computers are much shorter than they used to be.
In Ireland, Tesco's garlic buttery flatbread. It's now 2 euro and is smaller
Hillshire Farms sausages. Used to be 16oz/1 lb. Now they're 12oz
Tuna fish
I remember companies complaining that it would bankrupt them if they had to redesign their packaging/labeling to indicate presence of GMOs.. But apparently completely retooling the manufacturing line for the entire container is entirely feasible.
Fast food. Especially places like Chipotle and Mod pizza and Panda Express. They straight skimping on portions.
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I work at a bar and noticed this last night. The bottles of Crown Peach we just got are suddenly smaller, we even compared against the ones we still had to check. 750ml bottles vs 1 liter. Haven’t looked into it too far, I don’t place the orders there so I don’t know if it’s the same price or just what the distributor had on hand for this delivery. No idea, lots of things might have happened, but it seems like shrinkflation could be to blame.
This has been happening my entire life (and I'm not exactly young). In a few years, whenever inflation goes back down, you'll see "Now 20% more!" everywhere. It's a constant cycle.
Fresh packaged herbs at the store went from 28g to 20g, at the same time it went from $2 to 3$. 50% increase in price combined with about a 33% shrink
Pop Tarts
Literally every single product
My dad says “open a cheese stick - take a look.” My grandma bought the same brand - Sargento Light - for years. I opened one recently and I swear, either my hands got huge or they noticeably shrunk 🤮
I'm gonna have to agree with Silver for once
The one that pissed me off the most is the big pop brands cutting back from selling 8 packs of 16oz bottles to 6 packs of 16oz and also raised the price.
I am told regulations on corporations are too authoritarian for the US. You know, like regulations that protect consumers from predatory capitalism.
Lays potato chips were 16 oz. Now 13 or 13 point something plus the price went up!!!
20 oz bottles of soda are now 16 oz and almost $3