this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Shrinkflation
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A community about companies who sneakily adjust their product instead of the price in the hopes that consumers won't notice.
We notice. We feel ripped off. Let's call out those products so we can shop better.
What is Shrinkflation?
Shrinkflation is a term often coined to refer to a product reducing in size or quality while the price remains the same or increases.
Companies will often claim that this is necessary due to inflation, although this is rarely the case. Over the course of the pandemic, they have learned that they can mark up inelastic goods, which are goods with an intangible demand, such as food, as much as they want, and consumers will have no choice but to purchase it anyway because they are necessities.
From Wikipedia:
In economics, shrinkflation, also known as the grocery shrink ray, deflation, or package downsizing, is the process of items shrinking in size or quantity, or even sometimes reformulating or reducing quality, while their prices remain the same or increase. The word is a portmanteau of the words shrink and inflation.
[...]
Consumer advocates are critical of shrinkflation because it has the effect of reducing product value by "stealth". The reduction in pack size is sufficiently small as not to be immediately obvious to regular consumers. An unchanged price means that consumers are not alerted to the higher unit price. The practice adversely affects consumers' ability to make informed buying choices. Consumers have been found to be deterred more by rises in prices than by reductions in pack sizes. Suppliers and retailers have been called upon to be upfront with customers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkflation
Community Rules
- Posts must be about shrinkflation, skimpflation or another related topic where a company has reduced their offering without reducing the price.
- The product must be a household item. No cars, industrial equipment, etc.
- You must provide a comparison between the old and new products, what changed and evidence of that change. If possible, also provide the prices and their currency, as well as purchase dates.
- Meta posts are allowed, but must be tagged using the [META] prefix
n.b.: for moderation purposes, only posts in English or in French are accepted.##
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I don't think this is shrinkflation. 100g is a very, very common size for food products as here in Europe foods must have health charts (kcalories, sugars, etc) as both total for the package and per 100g. If the package is 100g it makes that easier and they only need 1 chart, good for smaller products.
This is just a European company selling the same product they sell elsewhere in a region that uses a very stupid measurement system.
They’re referring to the label on the shelf saying 4oz, which is ~113g. Seems to me like a mislabeling honestly.
I doubt it was ever 113g at any point. It's just bad rounding.
I 100% doubt this. In what place would you be allowed to round the weight of whatever you're selling up by half a unit?
It's a mistake in the label template. In variable label printing it is common to use the same template for all products, i would imagine that the weight is probably stored as a floating-point number in the database and it is required to round the number to fit it on the template. It probably looked fine for 99% of labels being printed, especially in the European market where we use the metre SI.. but in this case it did not work out, classic programmers nightmare to handle different locales especially for a company that probably centralize all label printing for all Ikea stores in the world.
That is a possible explanation, but I don't buy it for a simple reason: I don't know of any country where the shelf-label weight is allowed to differ from the actual gross weight by almost 15%. Ikea isn't a small chain that just opened. If you are indeed correct and they simply haven't bothered to update their templates, would really not a single person have sued since they started?
This being a temporary consequence of shrinkflation is far more likely than this being a permanent oversight. Sure, the US is the wild west for consumer rights in many aspects, but not this far.
They are probably just rounding up the 3.53 oz to 4 so make it more legible in the tag. It very well may have said 3oz if it had ended up being 3.47oz
That doesn't sound legal, but then again in the US it's okay to lie about prices on the label, so lying about weight should be just as fine.
Well there does need to be a cutoff somewhere.
If you were buying a cake you wouldn't necessarily need the price to say $.$$ per 30.54 ounces, 31 ounces is accurate enough.
Yes there is a much bigger difference between 3.5 and 4, but it easily could just be an error in their computer system since most things don't need to be that accurate.
I don't see why there needs to be a cutoff? In my country we list exact prices and weights. Of course there's room for error with the actual weight of the product in some cases, but that's unrelated to the label itself.
Listed is how many pieces, total price, as well as price per piece.
Same with weight, though gram instead of piece, as well as price per kilo, making any sort of conversion easy.
And same thing with volume.