It’s a strategy that’s meant in part to hide price hikes; a more expensive product might turn shoppers off, but a chip package with a handful fewer chips, and the same price, is a sneakier way of giving consumers less for their buck.
So who are the main culprits of shrinkflation? Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, asked the Bureau of Labor Statistics for its data on which products have been impacted the most by shrinkflation. Casey’s report reveals that several common household items have indeed been shrinking; your breakfast has perhaps been particularly impacted, with coffee and fresh pastries getting smaller and pricier. And if you feel like you’re going through paper towels and toilet paper at a rapid clip, it’s not just your imagination: It turns out that your household paper products — things like paper towels and toilet paper — are seeing the largest price increases from shrinkflation.
Shrinkflation is one way that policymakers and advocates say companies are attempting to squeeze more profits out of their customers. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics — who calls the practice “downsizing” — documents, it’s a tactic that makes sense if firms want to hike prices. Buyers are much more sensitive to seeing a price that’s higher than a package that’s a little smaller.
“Corporations are only getting more creative as they rake in record profits at the expense of Pennsylvania families: shrinking the size of their products while keeping the same sticker price. This corporate greed is one of the reasons that Americans are frustrated by expensive grocery bills,” Senator Casey said in a statement to BI. “My new report not only exposes them for their greed but outlines the steps we need to take to combat it and put more money back into the pockets of working families.”
Shrinkflation isn’t a new practice, as a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis documents: Ice cream containers have been shrinking for years, from 64-ounce containers to 48-ounce containers beginning in 2008, per the BBC. Same with cans of coffee, which shrunk from one pound of coffee to 13 ounces in the 1980’s, and then contracting even further to 11 ounces by 2003, according to CBS News. And, as the Federal Reserve research notes, it’s legal for businesses to shrink their products — they just need to accurately list the quantity of what’s inside.
Indeed, if you’re at the grocery store, or a drug store, you may not know that your favorite toilet paper roll used to have 264 sheets, but now has 244. That’s where Casey wants to see some direct action: He’s asking major food and beverage trade associations how their members came upon their new pricing — and if they’ve notified customers about how their product sizes have changed. In France, for instance, a supermarket has stuck warnings on it shelves about products that have been shrinkflated, as the BBC reports.
“These kinds of changes are often intended to obscure the very real fact that American families are getting less for their money. It is obvious that the cost of toilet paper rose; it is harder to detect that rolls shrank in size,” Casey writes in his report. “But both have the same effect: American families are getting less and corporations are making more.”
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