Or another being "Made in USA", where Usa was a city in Korea.
Which as a highlander I don’t see the need for - Japanese whiskey is quite able to stand in its own and hold its own.
Note that this is the most charitable interpretation where the customer deception is fairly minor(inflation happens, gotta sneak that price increase in there some how) Stuff like deceptive packaging(make it look like there is more than is actually present) punts it into the outright evil category.
My go-to example: your local hairdresser may keep the same prices (adjusted for the official inflation or otherwise), but over the years, they may have stopped serving coffee and started offering only water. The salon used to be beautiful and stylish, and now looks dirty and furnished with cheapest bargain-bin business store furniture. Flowers are gone or replaced with cheap plastics. Toilets never have toilet paper in it, faucet always leaking. Waiting room sofas got replaced with cheap chairs. Even the magazines are gone, and in their place you just get leaflets. Etc.
Repeat the same for your local grocery store, parking lot, car dealership, bus stop, airport, cinema, everything.
The second half of the inflation is literally everywhere, in everything - it can be easily seen once you start looking for it. And after that, you can't unsee it.
computers i think are more affordable now than even 20 years ago, in bang for buck
Everything has been spreadsheeted to death.
> I don't know what they put into pizza "dough" but it's not real flour.
Some clever fellow decided to shave a nickel by padding their shredded parmesan with sawdust and now the other brands of parmesan have "No cellulose!" on the label as if that is a selling point. Which it is, now, alas.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/17/parmesa...
https://www.cooksinfo.com/flour-grades
excerpt:
"French bakers will use straight flour in their bread making; North Americans and British generally don’t.
"Straight flour is separated by sifting in other grades. The straight flour is passed along a roller over different sieves. Different grades fall through the appropriate sieve along the roller. In the percentages given below, the lower the percentage of straight flour that falls through a particular grading sieve, the more desirable the flour."
Shelf life, reduced calories, ease of working with, etc, etc. Basically all those secondary goals you optimize for once it's a given that the pizza will pizza properly.
While I've no doubts shrinkflation explains a great deal of this, it would be interesting if increased mandatory food content reporting on packaging had even a small effect on reducing the calorie content of confectionery over time, as consumers could more easily compare etc and market responded with products in portion sizes to better fit preferences.
You can even see in the article photo, the more recent modern Mars bar has the calorific content printed on the front, in addition to the big label all UK food has on the rear. The 1991 example does not.
Except Blue Bell, who use a bright banner on their packaging to call out "Still 1/2 Gal!".
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)
Also, based on the statement, you're buying shit pizza from trash restaurants/frozen garbage. That's why the crust is bad. Pizza is one of the cheapest things you can make, that's why when I worked in restaurants I always said if you can't make money selling pizza you need to get out of the industry.
Taking the time to count the ways shrinkflation is (fractionally) eroding quality of life would take an age.
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.
Because that would fit a lot of people's perception of how food is going: you get less, but what you do get is worse for you.
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).
Also in big letters "OLIVE OIL" with barely legible "mixed with 90% sunflower seed, canola and other oils"
I am reading the container it says
Bac'n Pieces BACON FLAVORED BITS Great Bacon Flavor! artificially flavored
There's no crab in Krab sticks.
There's no cream in Krispy Kreme.
There's no vanilla in Nilla Wafers.
There's no mayonnaise in Just Mayo.
There's no lemon in Country Time Lemonade mix.
There are no truffles in most truffle oil.
There's no Wasabia japonica in most of wasabi.
If its labeled as olive oil it has to be just oil from olives. The "extra virgin" and related labels don't carry any real weight here in the US though. I do wish we'd enforce labeling standards on stuff like EVOO, maybe also require actual country of origin for that particular bottle instead of allowing them to list it may come from practically every olive oil producing country.
Please name and shame the product, and report it to the USDA.
(The key thing to remember is that sugar is bad for you; it's not that HFCS is good, but rather that cane sugar is just as harmful.)
Two fun additional notes:
* There's a video somewhere showing how cane sugar breaks down into fructose and glucose in bottled sodas anyways, and
* Perhaps unsurprisingly, taste testers can't reliably distinguish between HFCS and cane sugar formula Coke.
We have shaped our food culture in a way to maximize short term profit at the expense of making everyone fat and disabled longer term.
I pointed it out because its often used instead of sugar for cost reasons.
So in theory an extremely fresh mexican coke might be different, but in practice you're getting the same thing.
Excessive consumption of fructose leads to fatty liver and is just generally bad for you.
It's conceivable that if they've removed better quality ingredients, calories per gram of weight could go up.
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
Everyone likes to say Homer Simpson lived like a king. He had a car that was so bad it would be illegal to sell new today, no cell phone, no netflix, no Uber eats, clothes were so expensive it was worth the SAHM fix them, pizza or Chinese takeaway were a luxury, not a lot of furniture.
People today eat so well that broke 30 year olds will order haute cuisine and say it's basically the same price as home cooking (OK it's roughly as big a rip off as maccas in Australia but still ... home cooking can be dirt cheap).
Hmm. I think it's just as easy to find products that haven't gotten worse or more expensive as it is to find ones that have. 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.
I suspect shrinkflation has a lot to do with inflation. Companies degrade the quality of their products to preserve their margins which are being eaten up by inflation.
Pretty sad state of things when simple pleasures like beer or chocolate are hit so hard by enshittification.
Isn't capitalism great? The common pattern with everything seems to be large companies degrading size, quality, and features of products in user-hostile ways.
IMHO, we need pretty strict regulation specifying standard product sizes and minimum quality. It would kill shrinkflation and also make alternatives more comparable.
On a related note: I recently listened to this (very good) podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hidden-supply-chai..., https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-25/the-hidde...) that stated pretty bluntly that food in the US is also more expensive and lower quality than food in Europe.
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.
You don't have a choice most of the time. You get to pick from the options the manufactures provide. And it's not like the average consumer has infinite time to sort through all the options on every item, as well as misleading manufacturer BS (like shrinkflation).
> 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.
Sure, if you're in a fancy urban area you may have lots of options (the podcast cited New York as an example), but that's not true everywhere. It cited this hits hardest in rural areas.
Then there's the situation where you have 5 different options, but they all suck the same way because manufacturers are following the same incentives to screw their customers.
> 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 think I am owed a market structure that lets me make decisions with a reasonable amount of effort. Fixing the candy bar weight (for instance) means I can compare on price easily.
And regulating “what can people trade with each other” is not absurd, it happens all the time.