'Shrinkflation' strikes shoppers across the country | Hacker News Reader

'Shrinkflation' strikes shoppers across the country

dailymail.co.uk

35 pointspaulpauper11 comments

This is piece is strait confirmation bias for people who think inflation is happening. Besides cherry picking things that have gone up more then average last year(bacon, apples bread ...), They share this chart[0] with the 12 month percentage change average and a spike in June 2021, when there is clearly negative spike in June 2020, with addressing this. [0]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9818391/Shrinkflati...

Not sure why we need another name for the very old concept of Hidden Inflation which also covers more than the size but the quality of the materials used to produce products. https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Hidden+In...

I wonder if this will have any effect on obesity rates, or if people will just buy two jugs of sweet tea instead of one.

I feel like food prices are likely lower than they should be, so I kind of view this as "the market is working"?

It's not great for consumers, but I don't think shrinking sizes is necessarily worse than raising prices. Is it that people may not notice that some find objectionable?

I think I'd rather reduce farm subsidies and raise the minimum wage, and let the market reprice accordingly, rather than try to legislate against 'shrinkflation'

It is incredibly annoying to find you suddenly need to spend twice as much money to make the same meal rather than the 20% of extra unit price.

50% of previous value is obviously worse than 80%. If the effective price change was the same between the two would you have a strong objection to resizing vs raising price?

I need 100g. The product went from:

100g: £1

80g: £1

So I have to spend £2 to buy 160g, and waste 60g (£0.6)

I would much rather the product was 100g at £1.2, where I would be "wasting" £0.2.

Why are food prices lower than they should be? By how much?

Shrinking sizes IS raising prices.

The commodification of foods has led to a race to the bottom: quality is reduced to make it seem like you're getting a better deal when you really aren't.

- Fruits and vegetables are getting less nutritional as we've optimized for shelf-life, size and appearance.

- Ingredients in processed foods are tweaked to appeal to the lizard-brain and maximize profit at the expense of nutritional value. ex. adding large amounts of high fructose corn syrup to make otherwise unpalatable low-quality ingredients more appealing

- Farm subsidies have led to overproduction of low-nutritional-quality grains and encouraged the creation of processed foods which can capitalize on this market distortion

Many cheap foods that are available today are not healthy because market forces push them into cutting so they are able to compete on price. I'd rather prices or portion sizes get worse than continuing this race to the bottom.

What you're describing is reducing what the consumer receives from food for the purposes of maximizing profits. Whether that'a s function of altering the nutritional density, using lower quality ingredients, or simply reducing the overall volume what you are describing is in fact shrinkflation.

> I feel like food prices are likely lower than they should be, so I kind of view this as "the market is working"?

Lucky for us supermarket chains, food companies, and agribusiness, are very transparent when it comes to their costs and profit, so this is easy to verify. /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com