Talk:Shrinkflation

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Actual impact over time

I'm skeptical of the long-term impact of shrinkflation, it seems a completely different phenomenon from monetary debasement. Companies can't keep shrinking products over and over again, consumers aren't blind to value. Some shrinkflations are permanent, like Unilever reducing the size of their ice-creams to 250 calories [1] [2], but they can't be repeated over and over again.

The article presently includes very little statistical evidence. There is a long list of individual examples of shrinkflation, but this is statistically useless, and frankly a bit POV, since it doesn't include any examples of products getting bigger. There are statistical examples over short time periods, too short to be reliable. The closest the article comes is a graph from the UK ONS, which shows shrinkflation and also products getting bigger, sometimes a lot of them, but the graph is hard to interpret with regard to long-term impact. cagliost (talk) 06:41, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

For the 100-year period 1923 to 2023, the UK pound sterling lost 98% of its value [3]. Typical consumer products, such as a bar of soap or a bottle of orange juice, did not lose 98% of their size. Shrinkflation over long periods doesn't appear to happen. cagliost (talk) 13:24, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

List selection criteria

I suggest that the lists of examples primarily be:

• large-scale changes – coffee packages got smaller in the 1980s as an alternative to prices going up, cake mix got smaller when the price of flour went up around 2010 (18.25 oz per box to 16.25 oz)
• that happened during a time of inflation, and
• for which at least one source uses the exact word shrinkflation to describe what's happening.

I also suggest that editors remember that retailers set the prices, rather than manufacturers. So, for example, Dannon famously reduced its package size because it wanted a lower price on the grocery store shelf (therefore, it's not shrinkflation), but a lot of the grocery stores initially kept the old, higher prices because the grocery stores wanted some new, higher profits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:46, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

MAD magazine

Issue 73 of MAD from September 1962 has an article called "The Subtle Science of Packaging" which is an obvious commentary on shrinkflation, though it doesn't use the term. I was going to put a reference in the "Economic definition" section after the portion noting the term's first use, but that's a primary source and I don't know of any secondary ones. Any suggestions? Mapsax (talk) 01:17, 12 March 2024 (UTC)