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"Shrinkflation" practices are unethical

Prices of products increase all the time. This is completely normal in a healthy economy, and one of the driving factors here is that inflation is always kept slightly positive, if possible. (A positive inflation means that the purchasing power of money decreases over time.) There are very complicated reasons why a constant small positive inflation is good for the economy, and an experienced economist could probably hold a 2-hour lecture explaining the details of it.

Of course there are myriads of other reasons besides inflation that causes changes in the prices of products, as the global economy is an extremely complex dynamic system. For example, the cost of raw material production can change quite a lot over time. Sometimes it changes to be more expensive, sometimes to be cheaper. However, manufacturers of products extremely rarely will adjust the prices of their products down, only up. It's almost unheard of that some product becomes permanently cheaper.

Anyway, economics is complicated and not the domain of knowledge of the average person. Average people just buy products and see their prices, and they don't really like it when the prices increase. Oftentimes they might buy a competing product instead, if their usual brand increases in price.

Many companies try to combat this by trying to keep the price of their product unchanged. There are many, many things that they can try in order to achieve this, like lowering manufacturing costs, and so on.

One practice, however, that has existed since forever, is a lot more devious and unethical. And that's the practice of what has been named "shrinkflation". And that's the practice of reducing the size of the product while keeping its price the same.

This has been extensively studied by psychologists and economists: Most people don't notice small changes in product or portion sizes. Depending on the product (its original size and other factors), it can become about 5% to 10% smaller without most people even noticing. For example a bag of a consumable product could have 10% less than before, and almost nobody will notice (especially if the package size remains the same, so direct side-by-side comparisons between the older package and the newer one will not show any difference.)

And this has been widely used by manufacturers for decades and decades, probably close to a hundred years now.

People only start noticing when the same product shrinks in this manner repeatedly over the years and decades, in other words, when during the span of eg. 20 years the amount of product in the package has diminished by 20, 30 or even 40%. People who remember the product from 20 years prior will slowly start noticing the difference. Some might even have some 20-year-old version of the product stored somewhere, allowing them to make a direct comparison. There are examples out there where the shrinkage is absolutely ridiculous and laughable.

However, the vast, vast majority of people will never notice. People get accustomed to small changes in the portion sizes.

The thing is, this kind of "shrinkflation" is ethically questionable because it's dishonest. An outright price increase of the product is open and honest: The product has become more expensive, and the consumer can directly see it, even before purchasing the product.

However, decreasing the contents while keeping the package and the price the same hides this fact. It's literally trying to hide from the consumers that they are now getting less for the same money. The company is not being open and honest about it anymore. It's relying on consumers expecting the product to be the same, while in reality it has been surreptitiously changed for the worse.

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