alt Hacker NewsShrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
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Companies hate raising prices, or more specifically customers hate it when prices are raised so companies don't like to do it. especially in foods. As such the go-to dance to keep up with inflation is to reduce the size while keeping the price the same as long as possible, when this becomes too noticeable the size is returned to original the price is increased and a big 20% more is added to the package. Repeat as needed.
Note that this is the most charitable interpretation where the customer deception is fairly minor(inflation happens, gotta sneak that price increase in there some how) Stuff like deceptive packaging(make it look like there is more than is actually present) punts it into the outright evil category.
Which is why I say people claiming that inflation is at least 2x undercounted relative to lived experience are right. Everything diminishes, all across the board. Materials get cheaper. Service quality gets lower - and when it doesn't, all the incidentals around it get worse.
My go-to example: your local hairdresser may keep the same prices (adjusted for the official inflation or otherwise), but over the years, they may have stopped serving coffee and started offering only water. The salon used to be beautiful and stylish, and now looks dirty and furnished with cheapest bargain-bin business store furniture. Flowers are gone or replaced with cheap plastics. Toilets never have toilet paper in it, faucet always leaking. Waiting room sofas got replaced with cheap chairs. Even the magazines are gone, and in their place you just get leaflets. Etc.
Repeat the same for your local grocery store, parking lot, car dealership, bus stop, airport, cinema, everything.
The second half of the inflation is literally everywhere, in everything - it can be easily seen once you start looking for it. And after that, you can't unsee it.
> It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
computers i think are more affordable now than even 20 years ago, in bang for buck
Ice cream is 1.5 qt not 1/2 gallon. I don't know what they put into pizza "dough" but it's not real flour.
Everything has been spreadsheeted to death.
everything is being min-maxed, have you noticed how flimsy and soft cereal boxes have become, and plastic-packaged goods having thinner plastic, and often replaceable lids have been replaced with single-use film (thinking specifically of hummus for this one).
Taking the time to count the ways shrinkflation is (fractionally) eroding quality of life would take an age.
I'd be curious to know, with the reduction in size, if calorie density went up.
Because that would fit a lot of people's perception of how food is going: you get less, but what you do get is worse for you.
This is never more apparent than when you start making your own stuff from scratch. The comparison is stark.
You can google "CPI price change graph by type good" to find which things have undergone real inflation vs real deflation. TVs, phones, toys, clothes, furniture, cars.
Everyone likes to say Homer Simpson lived like a king. He had a car that was so bad it would be illegal to sell new today, no cell phone, no netflix, no Uber eats, clothes were so expensive it was worth the SAHM fix them, pizza or Chinese takeaway were a luxury, not a lot of furniture.
People today eat so well that broke 30 year olds will order haute cuisine and say it's basically the same price as home cooking (OK it's roughly as big a rip off as maccas in Australia but still ... home cooking can be dirt cheap).
Technology in the form of computers, cell phones, and AI have been getting cheaper and better. Access to information is another one but that requires agency to take advantage of and get the benefits. This could be personal health, starting/running your own business, using ai to help create ads for your business, etc.
> It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
Hmm. I think it's just as easy to find products that haven't gotten worse or more expensive as it is to find ones that have. For every mars bar, there's a video game.
Agreed. It's not just a reduction in size, but a reduction in general quality. For example, my preferred NIVEA roll-on deodorant used to come in a glass bottle and now it comes in a plastic one.
I suspect shrinkflation has a lot to do with inflation. Companies degrade the quality of their products to preserve their margins which are being eaten up by inflation.
At this point, it's worth mentioning this, if only to make you think the robot uprising can't come soon enough.
Nuggets are the same shape (boot, circle) but slightly smaller and much thinner now. If I had to estimate, probably 40% less pink sludge goes into each one.
What about the quarter pounder with cheese? Isn't that still a quarter pound? It would be illegal to sell any less in most places, not unless they change the name.
Inflation is the most honest. Shrinkflation can be okay if the marketing changes.
But what I cannot stand is cutting quality of products and services. It happens in all sorts of ways. Thickeners and substitutions but also when a supermarket wastes your time asking you to scan N of the same SKU at rather than providing a qty button and even the staff can't help. But on the old school checkouts they do have a quantity field. It's different when they know their time will be wasted you see. And then there is the endless market segmentation from coupons, bundles, surveillance pricing and all sorts of mechanisms designed to muddy price signals and discriminate to shake down every customer to their limit.
How much of this recorded in consumer inflation I wonder? So much effort is put into scheming rather than innovation which seems highly inefficient if you think about productivity. Isn't late stage capitalism great.
Its not just shrinkflation for these mars bars. Its sugar tax to reduce obesity
Televisions are clearly an exception to this rule and I would like to know why.
There's also 'Drinkflation', the ABV of beers being reduced. (Maybe it's mostly a UK thing due to the tax system, weaker beer = less tax)
Pretty sad state of things when simple pleasures like beer or chocolate are hit so hard by enshittification.
They're a 1/10th of a pound now?! In 2009, I worked at McDonalds and they were definitely 1/8th pound patties! Holy moly.
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> Shrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
Isn't capitalism great? The common pattern with everything seems to be large companies degrading size, quality, and features of products in user-hostile ways.
IMHO, we need pretty strict regulation specifying standard product sizes and minimum quality. It would kill shrinkflation and also make alternatives more comparable.
On a related note: I recently listened to this (very good) podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hidden-supply-chai..., https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-25/the-hidde...) that stated pretty bluntly that food in the US is also more expensive and lower quality than food in Europe.
The burger patties were absolutely not 1/8 pound. I can assure you from experience as a Professional McDonald's Worker in 2003 that those were 10:1 patties then as well. I can also vouch for the same from another major burger chain circa 2001. I'm sure they shrink everything possible, but interestingly they haven't been shaving down the beef quantities for some reason.