Shrinkflation

I want to talk about something related to inflation. You don’t need me to tell you how much prices have been rising. Inflation was 2.9% last month and has hit us all.

Prices have been rising everywhere- at the pump, at the grocery store, at Wawa. But you also need to be aware about one of the hidden forms of inflation: shrinkflation. This happens when the price of the item you’re buying might not go up, but the QUANTITY or SIZE you are buying goes down. So, you end up paying the same for less product and getting less for your money.

This is a trick companies use to hide inflation from consumers, instead of raising prices- they give you less product. Of course, most retailers won’t announce when a product has changed in size. Companies seem to think consumers will be annoyed if they charge a higher price for a product, but won’t notice or care as much if there are fewer chips in a bag or fewer tissues in a box. So even if you’re paying the same $1.28 for a bottle of Gatorade, that bottle is now 28- ounces instead of the earlier 32-ounces, though you might not have noticed it shrinking.  

In a survey published this month by the personal finance site Empower, 79% of consumers said that “there are less chips/cereal/product in a bag than there used to be.”  

You can check for shrinkflation by paying attention to the price labels on grocery store shelves, where weights and volumes are usually clearly marked. What you need to look out for is the unit price – which is how much the product costs per pound or ounce or liter. The price of the product might not rise due to shrinkflation – but the unit price will definitely rise.

It’s encouraging to know that Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey proposed a bill this year which calls for regulating shrinkflation as a deceptive practice.