| ▲ | BirAdam 5 hours ago |
| Shrinkflation is the diminution in product quality and/or volume to resist raising prices due to inflationary pressure. This has been happening in the USA since roughly 2001. Gadgets largely improved anyway though the market transitioned from metal and wood casings to brittle plastics, and there were other sacrifices made. This, however, isn’t shrinkflation. This is supply chain, demand, and uncertainty. |
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| ▲ | clickety_clack 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It feels to me like the nadir of gadget material casing quality was around 2010. Back then _everything_ was cheap ticky tacky plastic. Now the midrange of everything seems to be metal and glass, or at least a high grade, solid-feeling grade of plastic. The low end range of goods is obviously allowed to be as cheap as it is my using much cheaper materials. |
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| ▲ | throw0101c 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Shrinkflation is the diminution in product quality and/or volume to resist raising prices due to inflationary pressure. This has been happening in the USA since roughly 2001. This has been happening in the USA way before 2001: > In 1967, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA) was enacted to ensure that consumers had enough information to make an informed choice between competing products. The Act requires each package of household "consumer commodities" included in the FPLA's coverage to have a label that includes the net quantity of contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count (measurement must be in both metric and inch/pound units).[10] * https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Packaging_and_Labeling_Ac... > In fact, it was the humorist Art Buchwald who was among the first to sound the alarm. In a column entitled “Packaged Inflation” published in 1969, he lampooned the growing tendency to conceal price increases. Tongue in cheek, he praised American industry for “devising new methods to make the product smaller while making the package larger.” […] > In late summer of 1974, for example, Woolworth’s offered a packet of pencils at its back-to-school sale for 99 cents – same price as the previous year. But as a sharp-eyed reporter at The New York Times observed, the packages only contained 24 pencils, six fewer than the previous year. The same strategy affected packets of construction paper (24 sheets, not 30). * https://mikesmoneytalks.ca/shrinkflation-is-an-economic-mons... And in recorded history for centuries: * https://archive.ph/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/... |
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| ▲ | HWR_14 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This, however, isn’t shrinkflation. This is supply chain, demand, and uncertainty. It most certainly is shrinkflation. It's rising input costs decreasing the product quality. |
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| ▲ | zaphar 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That is an unusual definition of shrinkflation. I always understood it as quantity going down not quality. | | |
| ▲ | mrsilencedogood 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think at its root, the general idea of shrinkflation is that some desirable attribute of a product - quantity or quality - is slowly eroded while keeping the price the same. As a way to either increase margins, or preserve the price point. With there being some insinuation of malice, where the company is theoretically (...probably fully intentionally...) hoping consumers don't notice, at least for a while, that the deal keeps getting altered. | | |
| ▲ | acdha 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think that’s right, with the ire coming from the perception of being cheated somehow. There’s a fair group of people who think anything other than changing the price or the product name is deceptive, and they’ll keep talking about it that way even if other people don’t see it as worse than a price increase. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The ire comes from the actual deception. Why do companies make products worse rather than bumping the price? It's not because they think that's what people prefer. It's because they hope that at least some buyers won't notice the change. People think it's deceptive because it is. |
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| ▲ | sylos an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is unbridled greed, nothing more. |
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| ▲ | thrance 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My definition of shrinkflation doesn't require its purpose to be "resisting price inflation". Rather, I would bet that more often than not it is just a cheap lever to boost margins. |
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| ▲ | MrBuddyCasino 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“. |
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| ▲ | throw0101c 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“. A "good salary" (or at least the median) used to be $5000: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_personal_income_af... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... As the 'dollar has lost value' people have demanded more dollars in their salary. (Whether the two have kept up with each other is a matter of debate/concern.) | |
| ▲ | bluGill 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 100k is still a good salary. However is used to be a great salary, and most people are not in touch with how inflation has changed the value. | |
| ▲ | sandworm101 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 100k is almost double the average. That makes it a great salary even today. We in tech so easily forget how hard life is for the vast majority of workers. | | | |
| ▲ | drstewart 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nobody is in denial about a well known behaviour that happens to every currency | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | People might not be in denial, but too many are clueless/uninformed about inflation and its effect. You'd be surprised how economically iterate average people are. I had highschool colleagues who couldn't calculate VAT/sales tax out of a price on the whiteboard. Sure, people have heard of the word inflation, they know this word exists, but they won't be able to explain how it works and its effects throughout the economy. | |
| ▲ | MrBuddyCasino 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you ask a random person on the street what inflation is (and what it is not) and how a 1950s dollar compares to today and what lifestyle the average single income household affords you then vs now, you’re going to get a wrong answer in both cases. | | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean: If you came up to me and asked about how the value of the dollar and average lifestyles compare between the 1950s and today, I wouldn't be able to answer that either. If you forced an answer on the spot, then I'd have to guess at it -- and that guess would probably be a wrong. I simply don't know the specifics because that was 70 years ago and I wasn't around back then. I do feel confident that I could eventually produce a good answer (or perhaps even a great answer), but I'd have to do some homework in order to produce that answer. But without that homework, it's just not something that I can relate to because my present perspective does not include it. --- Meanwhile: If you asked random people on the streets of Anytown, USA about what they feel about price of a Big Mac or rent today compared to 5 years ago, it might be rational to expect to get some pretty direct and sometimes livid responses. |
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| ▲ | cyanydeez 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | OK, every time I see a comment about income on the internet, I have to assume that the person commenting has zero IQ if they mention nothing about COL. The same happens when someone mentions something about the Average income as opposed to the median income. The average income is meaningless if the top 1% keep going up while the rest of the system stays the same. The average would look like people are earning more money when they're not. Same thing with Market economics and the price of items. If I got a choice to sell a boner pill for $1 to a million people and $1 million to one person, those are equal value propositions. So whenever a corporation raises prices, they don't care how many customers they cut off as long as the remaining ones are whales. That's particularly sharp with all the AI costs being shoved into the pipe. So, that is to say, you really shouldn't just produce a single number about anything and treat it as some benchmark across the world. | | |
| ▲ | saltyoldman 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Technically even an income of 50k is really high for a person that just needs to pay property taxes and food (house is paid off for example). And if they live in Missouri, they are probably reaching "upper middle" especially if they already have savings. | | |
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