Shrinkflation

Hmmm...these cookies look a lot smaller than you remember, when you were a kid. Maybe that’s because you’re bigger now?

Nope. It’s shrinkflation. Don’t let it fool you; you have a right to know what’s going on with your cookies.

Shrinkflation is when a company reduces the size of a product little by little, keeping the price all the same. Your cookies got smaller and smaller and smaller; they hoped people wouldn’t notice, and still buy. In the view of the cookie company, shrinkflation is better than raising the price of the cookies and losing a bunch of customers to substitute goods, like other cookies, or heaven-forbid...ice cream.

Some companies take shrinkflation to the next level. Here’s what they do: they keep prices stable, slowly shrinking what’s inside bit by bit…until one day, they bump up the price a tad, and increase the size of the product to the original size it was before shrinkage. The package will say something like “50% MORE COOKIE INSIDE!” to justify the tiny price increase.

That volume increase is kind of a lie, kind of not. Sure, it's 50% more cookies than last week, but it’s not 50% more cookies than a few months ago. It’s the same amount of cookies as a few months ago.

Now you know: most packaged food and drink products around you are likely to be shrinking in size. Are Oreos really double-stuf'd? Something to ponder.