Size Matters
I remember being a teenager the last time inflation was this bad. And it was my first experience with what we are today calling “shrink-flation”.
It started with candy bars…regular old Hershey bars, to be exact. The price remained the same…but all of a sudden, the bars seemed smaller. It was easier to tell with a Hershey bar than, say, a Snickers bar because the Hershey bar was scored into different squares, so you could tell immediately there was a lot more paper and a lot less chocolate.
Not long after that, the “fun size” bars that you’d hand out at Halloween became smaller. They used to be good for two bites…now, you could get away with popping the whole bar into your mouth without fear of needing someone who knew the Heimlich maneuver.
That wasn’t enough, though, and soon the prices went up. The sizes stayed small, but the prices went up.
Same with coffee…you used to be able to purchase a one-pound can, or a three-pound can—back in the days when it really came in a can. Now it’s a plastic container, and instead of a pound—16 ounces—it’s 10 and a half or 11…the package shrank so the price could stay the same, but now it costs more than ever and the package is still smaller. Those three pound cans—48 ounces—now are down to 39. You need that size, plus what passes these days for a pound, just to get the three pound size you used to get. And again, don’t even start about the price.
Restaurant portions are smaller—that may be a good thing to help us not be so overweight, but we’re still paying the full price—if not more.
When this all happened forty years ago, the companies at first denied shrinking the product. This time, it’s so obvious, they’re not even bothering to cover for it, just reducing the quantity while at the same time raising the price.
I won’t be able to monitor this too much going forward, though…because the price of some of these things is so high, I refuse to buy them. I guess that’s one way to keep the grocery bill low…in addition to empty shelves preventing a purchase, now things cost more than I’m willing to pay.
And if that’s the bright side of all this…we’re really in a bad place.
