“Skimpflation” is hitting everything from food to hotels

Along with skimpflation in sizes, keep a look out for it in things like legally protected terms. For instance ice cream has to have a certain level of milk fat to be legally called “ice cream”, if they aren’t it’ll be called something like “frozen dairy dessert”.

I tend to hoard food and will consume it on a "first in last out" basis so I'm constantly rotating stock and nothing expires before being consumed.

One day I noticed that the bag of mixed nuts I just bought was labelled 50g less than a bag I had purchased a few months ago. It wasn't the case that there were less nuts in the bag. The bag itself was smaller so as to maintain the appearance of robustness.

What struck me is that this probably wasn't in response to any sort of supply or demand shock, but was probably already planned since the product was first introduced. The way the design on the package was already reconfigured and then the package distributed to factories to be filled with the new amount, the producers knew and planned beforehand that it would happen, number crunched and everything.

So now I already internally think to myself that any consumable product that screams great value will inevitably fall victim to skimpflation, because it was planned from the start. Make an awesome product, get people hooked on it, and then slowly ratchet back the value to reap the gains. And of course hope people don't notice.

> One recent example of skimpflation that consumers did notice involved Conagra's Smart Balance spread, a dairy-free butter substitute. Conagra recently changed its formulation to reduce its share of vegetable oil from 64% to 39% — an almost 40% reduction in vegetable oil.

Ugh, nobody should be eating congealed vegetable oil in the first place. One more advantage of eating real food like butter is that they can’t replace the ingredients with something else when it’s just one ingredient.

This has been an issue for quite a while. "Shinkflation" is what it was called before.

- SSD manufacturers have been caught subbing out chips from release to mid market life

- Airlines cut services during the pandemic but never repriced out it without that service (I'm looking at you SAS with closing the lounge but advertising lounge access at ORD)

- Restaurants are now asking 18-30% tip on their electronic card payments.

- Restaurants and stores are cutting hours and menus extremely aggressively while increasing prices and understaffing.

We've been having 'skimpflation' or 'crapiflation' for decades.

The hedonic adjustment in the inflation figures accounts for eg washing machines getting relatively cheaper with more functions etc. But it doesn't account for the fact they've also been getting crappier and shorter-lived.

Oh man, the Smart Balance debacle was real! My spouse and I noticed that it doesn't melt anymore. We thought we were going crazy, until we read about it elsewhere. Suffice to say we've switched away from it now and won't be going back. What a dumb move by the manufacturer.

I would really like to see a nutrition label for manufactured goods, including what countries parts come from. In particular I would love to see semantic versioning applied to manufactured products so it's easier to see when products change.

The worst part of Hotels are the additional Resort or Facility fees on top of room charges for features like wifi or a pool.

I'm surprised we aren't seeing hotels where the resort fee is more than the nightly fee yet, like the old .01$ + 10$ shipping on ebay.

The "best by" date on items in UK supermarkets has been contracting since the first covid lockdown.

Unless you buy frozen, you can't do the traditional "weekly shop" anymore unless you want a fridge full of expired food.

Either the shortage of preservative packaging gasses is in full swing still or they're doing it to keep people shopping more regularly while hiking prices.

If they can’t keep the price low then a lot of consumers will go for cheaper/lower quality goods anyway,

Even for high-end enthusiast items, consumer sensitivity to price is pretty high. Just look at how bitter people have been about the NVidia RTX 4 series GPUs.

I know someone who buys groceries from Target because it’s significantly cheaper than other grocery stores in their area. This seems due to Target still implementing a kind of national pricing. Possible unexciting arbitrage opportunity there, I suppose?

Dollarama always does this with their dog treats. Every year or so there is either one less treat in the pack, the actual treats get shorter, or looser wound to look the same size but now more hollow, or the price goes up 50c. My dogs used to chew them for 15 minutes to a half hour. Now they're a soggy mess within a couple minutes, so they don't get much chewing in from those same treats these days. My elder dog chews until it becomes soggy, then abandons it for a few days until it's hard again. It's really annoying because they never used to get soggy at all.

What used to have 6 in the pack is now 4 shorter, less dense, more expensive, yet packaged to look like nothing happened. All in only 4 years time!

It might be that consumers have to get into the habit of writing down sizes and prices of what they buy in order to witness first hand how they get short changed so often, but in a non-apparent way meant to deceive you at every step.

Tesla is removing Ultrasound distance sensors from Model 3 and Y https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/5/23388770/tesla-ultrasonic...

Keep an eye on price labels attached to the shelves and compare the weight listed on those labels with the weight listed on the package itself.

Trader Joes shrank their meatloaf from 24 oz to 16 oz, but at the store I visit, kept the same price label that still says 24 oz. A 33% reduction in weight for the same price as before.

And yet Arizona Ice Tea still has an MSRP of 99c

I doubt this is new, probably happening during the low inflation times too.

I remember when Hershey changed the recipe for Reese's Cups, removing palm oil, and other ingredients which made it less of an oily peanut butter, and more dry and cake like. I understand (now) the palm oil concern, but boy did it really change the texture and taste.

Ok.. the larger point about "inflation beyond just prices" is well understood but... why do people keep coining more and more new terms for this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkflation#Skimpflation

The phenomenon of disregard for quality, and selling products with a negative value for an apparently low amount, is hitting the basics.

Recentmost experience: shoes. This friend of mine bought a new pair of shoes only days ago, and started having definite pains after a few days. So he opened them, which revealed that the soles were hollow, the thickness given by a form of honeycomb, in shape of a grid with large holes: he was hammering his heels on plastic blades, hidden by a thin soft buffer.

And some professionals confirm that build quality has greatly declined in general, even beyond this extreme example.

Shoes are probably on par with food in a ranking of basic needs - it makes sense to think that you will have a hard time obtaining food without a decent foot protection. And today, we are having problems in securing even this.

I'm sure it also makes sense that for the same salary, workers should be provided fewer hours...right???

Benjamin Moore did this with their paints in the past two years, and the colors are noticeably more dull now. The SDS (safety data sheet) for some of their most popular paints like Advance used to have the specific amount of 25% Titanium Dioxide, and they now list the range of 20-25%. From reading on the internet, this compound is the white base and also is in short supply these days. So now colors like Simply White are actually pretty dull and grayer now. You'll notice this easily if you put something with the new color up against the old color, where the old color will show as the brighter one.

Non intuitively (to me at least) this somewhat explains the proliferation of the dollar stores. These stores sell name brand products packaged in small quantities at a relatively low price, but high margin. Making each location much more profitable than the big box stores. Especially since each location typically only has one or two employees on duty most of the time.

The box of Cheerios is so thin now that it will fit into a Padded envelope

Starbucks in my area has cut down on wifi speeds dramatically. All 3–4 stores I frequent have been slowed down. Wonder if locations in your area are like this.

I have a Pepsi Max every now and then and I noticed the taste had changed. However, it seems to have gone back to the original flavor for now.

It's funny being able to do mental arithmetic. I instinctively calculate the price per weight of almost every food product I buy, then I have to remind myself that most people don't do that.

This is a good test. If we truly are a capitalist economy then we’ll see competition enter and new products that sell quality offerings.

My prediction is that won’t happen. There’s been too much consolidation and efficiencies through scale that it’s impossible for a company to get founded to sell a toilet paper that’s not 20% thinner or any of the other examples mentioned.

On the upside at least companies are cheating us out of our money only and no longer selling us products that will kill us due to safety or poisoning issues. That’s progress.