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.