201–210 of 240 posts
Another source of shrinkflation is changing ingredients. Something that used to be 50% water is now 75% water as an example. Another is changing from olive oil to canola or palm or, and things like that.
The worst part of shrinkflation is restaurants who have reduced the sizes of their meals, in my opinion. I’ve seen this quite a lot in everything from fast casual places like Cava to locally owned establishments.
That may not be a bad thing per se. In plenty of restaurants the amount of food in a serving is way too large for me and the alternative probably was to raise prices. In restaurants food isn't usually the high margin product, that's alcohol.
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It's basically 'race to the bottom' but that term is not very inspirational. It's not evoking any kind of reaction in the masses.
Neither is "enshittification." Only HN and some tech bloggers even use it as far as I know, and mostly just to be able to imply something is "turning into shit" while pretending to use a precise term of art. But it isn't, it's a poop joke.
In an ideal world, one UPC code would identify only one product with one set of ingredients and one weight. Want to make a "+20% free!" package? New UPC! Want to change the contents from 16% cacao to 14% cacao and some more sugar? Sure, new UPC. The manufacturers would have to publish the contents for each UPC in a machine readable format. Then the retailers would have to publish daily prices, again in a machine reda…
I thought this too, re: for Amazon review farming, but products are never homogeneous from the start. All products have multiple component suppliers, with different tolerances/varieties, where the components are judged "close enough". Suppliers come and go. And even if it's a single large supplier, they may have different farms/factories/etc so you won't even be getting homogeneous components from them.
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Actually, free markets do lead to better products. But they cost more than the worse products. Look at coffee. The gradual shift from Arabica to more Robusta beans over a generation. Each year, an imperceptible shift was taken that, over decades, lead to coffee that tastes terrible. Opening the door for companies like Starbucks and a ton of gourmet roasters to compete. But properly roasted, single origin coffee costs…
The only thing that Starbucks did for coffee was that children now also love to drink it. In fact their coffee doesn't taste like coffee, but more like mocha/hazelnut ice cream.
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It is already open information that pretty much every seller of everything in the whole world tries to sell for as high of a price that they think can get. And that purchasing power of currencies will go down over time.
> And that purchasing power of currencies will go down over time. This is only true when you keep printing more of it. The creation of currency outpacing the creation of value is inflation.
There was over a decade of QE which the rainmakers said would totally cause inflation. It didn’t.
Then there were supply side shocks which would definitely only cause transitory inflation. Also wrong.
Then we learned that sentiment causes it, and in the middle of terrible sentiment inflation went down.
Every complex problem has a simple, intuitive, easy to understand wrong answer. It is not an exaggeration to say that we do not know what causes inflation.
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Did they get smaller or just fewer in the pack?
The eggs got smaller. BJ Novak did the research, https://youtu.be/TlXLCrzpToo?si=0i6G9NFSbr9aKiaN
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Just one more factor to consider, some ingredients are no longer available. Trans fats are a good example of this. They used to be the prime replacement for saturated fats. Now, in the US, they are effectively banned. This hit oreos. [1] [1] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2006/01/02/manufacturers-tri...
Fair point. Were oreos always palm oil or were they lard back in the day? The fracking industry has made guar gum too expensive to use as a food emulsifier. I know someone who reacts to xanthan gum (which has all but replaced guar) and she's not a happy camper, because it's in fucking everything.
They did use lard till mid 90s.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2008/02/getting-lard-out-ko...
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The only thing that Starbucks did for coffee was that children now also love to drink it. In fact their coffee doesn't taste like coffee, but more like mocha/hazelnut ice cream.
Today’s Starbucks is well removed from its origins. Starbucks was never great coffee, but I’ve heard it started out pretty decent. Much like how McDonalds, KFC, etc started by making decent food so did Starbucks. Add 40+ years of optimizing for the bottom line and the average person’s pallet and you get a very different product.
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> Do we put that under the shrinkflation umbrella No we call it just that, enshittification.
>No we call it just that, enshittification. I'll be glad when this juvenile meme finally passes out of Hacker News' system.