I worked at McDonald’s a decade prior to that, and they were 10:1 then, too. I think it’s possible and maybe likely some other chains might have switched from being 8:1 to 10:1 since the market leaders already had that size. There are much better examples though than some isolated regional player’s beef patty sizes.

We used to buy half gallons and gallons of ice cream. Brands started selling 60 or 62 ounces instead of 64. Over the years, it’s gotten to where some brands sell 48 ounces - three pints - instead of 64.

Breakfast cereals have had similar shrinking sizes.

Didn’t they also have filler then remove it to be 100% beef at some point?

Yep. People blame companies, but ultimately they are doing what the customer 'wants'. Same with things like separate fees for credit cards, or shipping. Customers don't like seeing an extra fee, so companies roll it all together - even if it often means they end up paying more in the long run.

I also note you completely forgot about the other strategy: taking the losses out of the ludicrous profits.

That has become no longer true since last year.

20 years is too long in the past, so indeed computers were more expensive then.

But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

2011 was actually the last year when I bought a computer with only 16 GB of DRAM, but today I hope to not need a computer any time soon, because I would not be able to buy as much memory as I want and as much memory as I have in my old computers, bought at a time when they were much cheaper than today.

Not only DRAM, SSDs and HDDs have exploded in price, but also the mini-PCs with Intel or AMD CPUs have a double price than last year, when bought as barebones, without memory.

For now, it is not obvious how much the prices have increased, because there are on the market a lot of obsolete computers that have remained unsold from the previous years, and which are cheap, but if you would want an up-to-date model that would be a true upgrade over whatever old computer you have, then the price is steep. (That means that for example in the case of barebone mini-PCs you can find cheap models with Intel Arrow Lake H or AMD Zen 4 CPUs, e.g. around $500, but the corresponding models with Panther Lake or Zen 5 are double in price, e.g. around $1000.)

We had a good run where PCs were not very popular (all the "PC is dying" headlines we got, huh) and the parts were improving so fast that there was a healthy second hand market with aggressive prices.

Nowadays you get a cpu that's 10% every 2 years (or every 4 if you don't take into account amd 3d cache parts) and a gpu that is basically the same with better RT performance (unless you pay an obscene amount of cash for the nvidia top of the line).

Second hand market is way worse as parts last longer being relevant and prices in retail and second hand markets go up as result. Put on top of that a crypto frenzy followed by an AI frenzy and the DIY market has been in a dark age for a decade.

I'd say a pc you buy today is more performant for the price than one bought 10 years earlier. But 10 years earlier you could get yourself something very nice for 500 bucks and today you just can't do that as entry level everything starts at like 700 bucks or more.

If you measure ‘bang’ by hardware metrics, they’re clearly orders of magnitude better value today. But if ‘bang’ means usefulness at solving life’s problems, it’s harder to compare, because the problems have changed so much, and so many of them now come from computers.

But what about 1 year ago?

Flights are cheaper than ever.

yeah but now you need 1GB of ram to run the weather apps so..

yes, they have more hardware power, but the bloated software requires more hardware power, so in most cases it doesn't really translate into gains for the user

The exception that proves the rule.

To be honest, for some things, getting a smaller serving and/or higher price is a blessing in disguise - health-wise at least. Same with soda servings where very large cups or bottles encourage higher consumption.

> Ice cream is 1.5 qt not 1/2 gallon.

Except Blue Bell, who use a bright banner on their packaging to call out "Still 1/2 Gal!".

    > I don't know what they put into pizza "dough" but it's not real flour.

> I don't know what they put into pizza "dough" but it's not real flour.

That conspiracy doesn't make sense given that flour is probably the cheapest ingredient in a pizza besides water. You'd have a hard time finding something cheaper, not to mention hiding it (either from the ingredients list, or from your conspirators)

Blue Bell is a real half gallon.

Potentially as a side effect. A lot of ingredients are switched to cheaper, often more processed substitutes.

For example, vegtable oil instead of olive oil, fructose corn syrup instead of honey or sugar.

Beyond that chainging composition to reduce amount of expensive ingredients. Think Pesto Genovese which is originally Parmesan, Basil, pine nuts, etc. Instead of only pine nuts, you now include other nuts for texture and only add a smaller amount for flavour (and worse add flavoring so customers don't notice too quickly).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22486545/

I'd be relatively surprised if the Mars bar's calorie density went up after it was ruined in 2002. The old Mars bar was a beast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49245791 .

A lot of people feel like stuff tastes worse than it used to, too

That's obviously hard to measure because you can't do a blind taste test of a 20 year ago candy bar and one today, and people's tastes change as they get older. But worse ingredients making a worse flavor is possible too

I have found it is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper to cook at home, even once you factor in the "lost" time.

The amount of time required to prepare incrementally larger batches increases at a sub-linear rate. The bigger your batch, the more food you get per unit of wall clock time. I try to prepare no less than 3 lbs of dry beans or 2 lbs of beef at a time. Anything less does actually feel like I'm wasting my energy.

Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation). Put differently, if more people had time and money to do what you do, you wouldn't bother to do it, either.

I find it apparent when I very occasionally take a break from making my own stuff from scratch and get a takeout.

Totally, a huge swathe of things are better and cheaper when your make them yourself, you just need the time. Shame we've given up all our free time to work so we can buy worse alternatives.

Citation not required, but it would likely help make your case...

Also "Access to information" is a funny one, most of the useful information is crowd sourced via direct sources like wikipedia and now indirect sources like LLM's regurgitating all human knowledge. Everything a company is selling you is getting worse, one can only assume the same will happen with AI, as soon as possible otherwise the AI companies won't be able to payback on the investment.

Nobody cares that their TV is cheaper when it now smashes ads in your face while using your bandwidth to serve botnets and sends a heartbeat even when offline. Everything that actually matters, like good healthy food or youth sports, is increasingly expensive or shrinkflated.

> using ai to help create ads for your business

whenever i see this i drives me away, i'd rather buy from a business that drew stick figure ads by hand. funniest thing i saw was an ai food ad and someone asked if the ai makes the food as well. the staff were actually miffed lol.

Retro gaming is rising in popularity for good reasons. And it's not purely nostalgia.

A lot of people aren't enjoying modern games (with modern monetization)

Video games are honestly a pretty bad example. 10-20 years ago, you'd buy your video game, and it was a complete item, that you owned and could play for as long as you didn't damage it. Once you were done with it, you could lend it to friends, or sell it and recoup a decent chunk of money for the next game you wanted.

Now with everything digital only, you don't even own your games, your ability to play it is at the whims of mega-corporations. You can't resell it to recoup money, or lend it to a friend. Most games start on day 1 as essentially a beta, with tons of huge updates required to get them in a decent state, loot boxes, microtransactions, live service games taking over the entire market share, RAMmagedden driving up console prices post-launch, etc etc etc etc.

They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.

TV's for one, have become insanely cheap. You can get 4k TVs for like, nothing, especially after inflation adjustments from the 2010s. Bigger panels, brighter screens, too bad we started shoving stupid and annoying OSes and Ads in them.

I think the implication is specifically for physical products. Video games aren't standardized sizes or materials and you don't somehow download 20% less content today than you did downloading the same game 5 or 10 years ago. (Ignoring some obvious outliers like games/content pulled due to licensing expirations - which are really stupid.)

Subjectively, video games did get both worse and more expensive over the last 20 years.

But putting that aside, the ratio isn't 1:1. I'd expect the ratio to be at least 20:1 - you can name at most 1 thing that got better/cheaper for every 20 things that got worse/more expensive.

Video games of yore were actual games you could buy and play with friends. You had a physical copy and never had to renew a subscription, watch ads, or pay anything extra to unlock content. Most games didn't even have a separate launcher. Just run it and play. Updates, when they existed, were small. And no lootboxes, no gambling. They had hidden maps or levels, so it actually was fun to play the same game repeatedly.

I can't fathom why you'd pick video games as your example ffs.

show me a modern video game that is better than Myst or Riven (in the same genre)

I even prefer the original CS over most of today's FPS games.

What alternate reality are you living in where the video games industry isn't a charred husk of what it was, just over a decade and a half ago?

What's it like to live in a world where competent AAA studios are still plentiful, and the legacy studios successfully passed down knowledge and ethos to new hires, so as to avoid becoming skinsuit versions of their past selves?

How is it, living in a world where several AAA blockbuster games are still being released annually, with none of them being remakes of decade-plus-old titles?

Is there any wisdom in how your reality's AAA video game industry kept the stride they built up to in the 2000s, into the 2010s, that you could share with us, so we can hopefully rebuild the smoldering crater of a AAA video game industry we have in our reality?

> For every mars bar, there's a video game.

The economics of software (including video games) are entirely different than candy bars or burgers as the marginal cost of each "unit" is effectively zero.

That's not the case in the US. If anything I see far more beers that are 6-10% now.

Or just don’t buy shitty mass produced chain products? The non-chain restaurants in my area are significantly better than 30 years ago. So are the breweries. Dive bars have gotten more sparse but the ones still around are better than ever. Food trucks are everywhere and good. Foods more expensive but you can still get a good restaurant cooked meal at 1/2 an hour’s minimum wage.

Like, if you buy garbage in a wrapper you should expect garbage. No one owes you a candy bar that never changes weight. The idea you would want to regulate that level of “what can people trade with each other” is absurd.

I believe it that US food is more expensive and lower quality.

I was just thinking about bread in the US specifically. When I go to the grocery store here the bread is relatively expensive, and the vast majority of it is full of chemical additives. It subjectively tastes like fake crap. It's mass produced in a factory and shipped across the country, and for all that it's not even cheap to buy.

There are one or two specialty bakeries in my city but they are far apart, and a bit expensive, though still so much better than what is available at the chain groceries. I'm sure there are lots of places in the country that don't have those local options at all. Feels like the basic unadulterated loaf of bread has in the US become more of a luxury item than a cheap staple.

In my limited European experience (Italy and France mostly), there were numerous small bakeries in every single neighborhood I visited. I could easily take a short walk and grab a baguette or loaf for 1-2 euro, far cheaper than in the US. The bread was delicious and fresh, locally made, free of all the questionable additives.

Then repeat that for other things like cheese, berries, cured meat... each available in Europe with so much less additive or alteration, so much less mass production, cheaper and more plentiful. My travel diet was excellent and felt both healthier and cheaper.

I'm not sure what lead to this cultural difference. Maybe centralization, car culture, difference in regulation, or something else entirely. But the end result is a bit depressing.

I'm a little surprised to see this perspective on a tech website, because technology has gotten wildly cheaper and better over the past 20 years, and there are a number of free, excellent services that just didn't exist 20 years ago.

Like, internet speeds are far faster than they used to be, cheap phones are much better than expensive phones were a decade ago, TVs used to be an expensive status symbol 15 years ago — and look at them now.

Video games basically didn't index with inflation for years, and it's easy to pick up great older games at cheap prices on sale.

YouTube is free and an incredible resource for learning, entertainment, and brainrot.

Google Maps provides free GPS services, which are incredibly valuable. You even have FreeVee-style streaming services that don't require a subscription.

Yes, capitalism is pretty great? The one complaint I have never really seen anyone seriously aim at capitalism before today is "capitalism is an inferior system for the delivery of hyperpalatable junk food".

Eh, it’s more that degrading size and quality is used to mask the effects of inflation. You can absolutely find high quality products, they’re just more expensive - to some extent, they’re a more realistic price.

Why regulate this when you can just search out and buy better products? My farmers market has great deserts.

You think you are buying a TV but you are actually buying a billboard. With how scarce our attention is in the current era, advertisers are paying a pretty penny to shove an ad in your face via your TV's 'smart' features with the hope of getting a guaranteed conversion. If this strategy becomes even more lucrative I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future you can get a 4K top of the line "TV" for free.

TV shows on the other hand, have suffered extreme shrinkflation.

From 20+ episode seasons every year to maybe 8-10 episodes every 2-3 years.

Yeah, budgets/production values are higher. But characters and storytelling were often better in those old shows (Star Trek TNG/DS9, Lost, 24, Breaking Bad) where they could make those longer seasons every year for 5 or more years in a row. Simply far more screen time for character development.

They don't last as long anymore and are more difficult to repair.

Because TVs can be made to show ads, especially if the manufacturer themselves partners with an ad network.

China

Does your television not take 10 seconds to start, 2 seconds to respond to button inputs, request internet access, try to sell you things, and exfiltrate your personal data? If not: where are you getting your televisions?

No, McDonald's has always been 10:1 for the "regular" burgers, I think forever but certainly back to the early 1980s when I worked there.

Crying online!

You’d think competitive brands could launch to bring joy but everyone is so cash strapped that those brands lose since the mega corps price cheaper even if it’s worse/shrinkflated. Or they just get bought and rolled into the oligopoly!

There was that guy who killed that billionaire, but it didn't change anything long-term.