alt Hacker NewsShrinkflation is to me the best example of why pure short-term-ism is a cancer. The first jackass to do it, say by taking a soup can of 16 ounces and adjusting it to 15.75oz, it boosted the profits that quarter. Mathematically, we could keep asymptotically shaving the size by 1.6% every couple years forever, but IRL that won't work because the amounts needed to be shaved would get so small as to not have the cost savings effect (or even be possible to precisely measure). So in reality the amounts need to be more like an actual quarter or half ounce at a time. So at some point the soup can, the candy bar, etc. would become so small that with one more shrink, people will recognize that it can't even feed one person, and at that point, all the "value" that was extracted by the previous CEOs to goose their stock price short term will be exhausted, and they'll have to move on to watering it down or whatever. But our packages will stay that idiotic minimum size forever.
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This is very old, though. The Roman era experienced monetary inflation through "coin clipping", which was literally shaving bits of silver off coins and remelting it together. This is why modern era coins often have milled tamper-evident edges, even if the metal is no longer worth the face value.
Don't you remember how they recovered from this after 2008? That's when they started selling "family size" options that are bigger, but with a not-so-obvious price increase where you can't really tell if it's more or less expensive per oz.
Price-conscious shoppers still buy the smaller thing if it's cheaper per oz (and only if the stores show the price per oz on the shelf), but most people just get the bigger size because that's how much they want to consume, and they can't really tell that the 15% increase in size does not equate to 19% increase in cost.
Many stores would stock the family size separate from the regular size so the shoppers couldnt easily compare price per oz.
Eventually the family size just becomes the regular size, but now at the higher price. Then the shrinking happens again.