back
604 comments
Shrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
The burger patties were absolutely not 1/8 pound. I can assure you from experience as a Professional McDonald's Worker in 2003 that those were 10:1 patties then as well. I can also vouch for the same from another major burger chain circa 2001. I'm sure they shrink everything possible, but interestingly they haven't been shaving down the beef quantities for some reason.
Which is why I say people claiming that inflation is at least 2x undercounted relative to lived experience are right. Everything diminishes, all across the board. Materials get cheaper. Service quality gets lower - and when it doesn't, all the incidentals around it get worse.

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.

Companies hate raising prices, or more specifically customers hate it when prices are raised so companies don't like to do it. especially in foods. As such the go-to dance to keep up with inflation is to reduce the size while keeping the price the same as long as possible, when this becomes too noticeable the size is returned to original the price is increased and a big 20% more is added to the package. Repeat as needed.

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.

> It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.

computers i think are more affordable now than even 20 years ago, in bang for buck

Ice cream is 1.5 qt not 1/2 gallon. I don't know what they put into pizza "dough" but it's not real flour.

Everything has been spreadsheeted to death.

This is never more apparent than when you start making your own stuff from scratch. The comparison is stark.
I'd be curious to know, with the reduction in size, if calorie density went up.

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.

McDonald’s has been 1/10th pound since 1950.
Technology in the form of computers, cell phones, and AI have been getting cheaper and better. Access to information is another one but that requires agency to take advantage of and get the benefits. This could be personal health, starting/running your own business, using ai to help create ads for your business, etc.
> A Mars spokesperson said: "Over the last 35 years, we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand, alongside considering wider external factors such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa."

I can guarantee you this is not “consumer demand”. Nobody goes to the store thinking “I wish shrinkflation was even more prevalent and that I’d get even less for my money”. Screw you corporate BS PR department, you’re not even trying.

I was surprised to learn the Mars bar familiar from my childhood wasn't a product of the original American corporation Mars Inc.

Frank Mars founded the American company. His son Forrest invented Milky Way, but then eventually quarreled with his dad and was removed from the business. Forrest moved to England, founded his own company, and the Mars bar was his first product: a European version of Milky Way.

Later he inherited the original American business and merged the UK one into it.

We're tracking prices and packaging for food since 2012 at Open Food Facts, and we have a food archeology project: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Project:Archeology https://world.openfoodfacts.org/open-food-facts-mobile-app

Feel free to add what you have in your attic ;-)

Food reporting is often framed like this, as if the smaller size was a bad thing, or the price / gram, pound or ounce is the relevant criteria. Esp in the case of candy, you would think smaller sizes would satisfy the other framing for food items, esp in America, that over-sized food leads to obesity. It is a lose-lose framing, with nutritional value completely ignored. Instead, the reporting is always how people are being ripped off or making an unhealthy choice.
What a world we live in, that someone finding a 35 year old candy bar while cleaning out a hoarder's house gets its own tier 1 news article.
Just my personal anecdata, it took my a while to put a finger on it, but it seemed like something started to change in products in the 90s. Bag of chips started to fill up with more air and less chips, candy bars got smaller, airlines started reducing seat sizes. Super huge discount? retail stores opened, that you usually needed a membership card. Walmart started offering the cheapest sourced product from around the world that was often just slightly inferior to what you use to be able to get, or the price on the higher quality item went up while the slightly lower quality item price went down. Washing machines started using all these cheap plastic parts that more easily wear down or break. Electronics started to get added to everything whether it is needed or not, usually for switches where the electronic part is cheaper than the mechanical equivalent.

And I realized, this is what people want, in the sense of this is what they will pay for, this is how they vote with their wallet. What I want is not this, but it is what society wants.

Reducing the portion size for junk food is probably a good thing. This is a rare case where shrinkflation may actually be beneficial to all parties.
"20g" (actually 22.5g) hides the fact that it's 56% bigger than today's Mars bar...
Basically any "brand name" product which isn't either family owned or privately run by an extremely idealistic founder/CEO ends up getting predictably worse over time. Once some private equity fund buys you out and determines you are not on the quality/price Pareto frontier and can manage to lose only .8% of your revenue making your product .9% cheaper, the die is already cast.
Since we are commenting in a tech website about chocolate bars, I'll say this. I bought one or more every day for years during my childhood from about 7 years old to 12 years old. Must have walked and rode my bike enough to stay fit. I also filled my lent box when I gave them up (Church donation, put the money you would spend on your daily fun into a box instead of spending it)
I’d be more interested in the ingredients. I would guess the 91 version has a lot less weird stuff in it?
I'm not sure why this is surprising.

In the US we try to maintain inflation at a target rate of 2%. For commodities where the costs aren't able to keep pace with inflation you'd either expect prices to double every 35 years or for the product to be half-ish the size (assuming labor costs scale by size). It's a 99 cent candy bar so...

I think inflation rate and costs of lots of things due to oil has jumped so much in the last few years that both the costs have gotten mouth watering and sizes have gotten noticeably smaller. But I prefer either of those to leveraging even more low cost filler, which I assume is the other option.

I honestly think in the US portion sizes tend to be larger than I need here so I'd honestly prefer if they lowered prices and dropped sizes to something reasonable.

Well i mean yes shrinkflation is obviously a thing. But in this case... People are anyway eating too much sugar and processed food.

In the end it is like a sugar tax just that in this case the company itself did apply it and not the goverment.

I know people will buy it anyway also when its more expensive...

Just eat less processed food its harder to trick you and much more healthy.

Article could have profited by adopting a neutral tone instead of attempting to be comedic. Surely information on historical sizes has not been lost. As for the candy bar market: the ideal outcome for the consumer would be if a single candy bar ended up being a reasonable portion size, priced proportionately to cost to produce.
I am always reminded at a convenience store if I pick up a candy bar that some of my earliest memories include them costing 5 cents in the early 1970s that very quickly became 10 cents and by the late 70s, maybe 25 cents max for a standard size. Today, easily 10x this.
Remember there was a time when a lot of goods weren't sold pre-packaged? My mom used to send me to the grocery with instructions like "buy two hundred grams of sausage and three hundred grams of cheese" and would give me the bags to pack them. There weren't dozens of kinds of sausages or cheeses in the grocery, and the way they were sold was that the person manning the stand had to cut them to the size the customer asked for. Same with cookies, sweets, grains, fruits and vegetables. To buy cream you had to bring your own jar. Sugar? -- you had to come with your own bag.

Packaging was more expensive to manufacture and often made the product quite a bit more expensive overall. It was sometimes seen as a scam as in "packaged deal" where unrelated extra stuff was made a mandatory part of the purchase if you wanted to have the other part.

Seeing shrinkflation as a next step in packaging evolution, I think that the general direction can be described as quality of life decreasing as a result of laziness that could be met half-way with technology. The technology dropped the quality but at the same time freed more time to do other enjoyable things. Sometimes completely sealing the way back so that now even the other things aren't as enjoyable, there's no way of going back to the supermarkets where you could buy goods by weight.

Ironically you can barely find a single mars bar in the UK these days. Usually what's stocked is "Mars Duo": two mars bars in one wrapper.
Checking Amazon UK[0], it seems there are 18g, 39.4 g and 51 g Mars bars (and 57 g Mars Protein bars). So it's not clear weather a 60 g Mars bar is that much of a good example of shrinkflation, but 40 g seems to be the wrong comparison.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=mars+bar

I’ve tried a few college treats like Hot Pockets and found they are really terrible. I was a bit ashamed that I could have possibly enjoyed something that bad.

The upside of shrinkflation is that you actually may have had great taste, it was the product that declined. It’s not just the portion size, the ingredients and flavor profile are much worse.

And then we have the Freddo comparison [0] over here as well, not in skinkflation terms, but in a how is that going up in price terms (Although I've seen them at 39p recently, so probably out of date)

[0] https://thefreddoindex.com/

Shrinking portion sizes for junk food is probably the best thing we could do. Some 37% of Americans are obese. Back in the 40s and 50s, a normal amount of, say, Coca-Cola was a tiny-ass little bottle. Now you can get a half-gallon at the movies.
Just charge me more, don't cut the size down. It's like I'm buying bite sized chocolate bars these days and the price is higher. If I'm going to pay more give me the original sizes.
Scunthorpe mentioned!
This does not surprise me. I noticed in the early 2000s that the Yorkie bar suddenly no longer had the 6 letters on the squares. Turns out... They sneakily reduced them to only 5! So the word no longer fit. If it weren't for the letters I might not even have noticed.

Also when I worked in a bar every year we got be beer glasses from the brewery. Every year they fit a little bit less. You could fill an old one to the brim, pour it into the new ones and yep it would overflow.

So sneaky and this has been going on year after year.

Has BBC just discovered shrinkflation?
Summary "In accordance to our customer feedback we decreased the package size and increased the price. "

The business would like nothing better than you to buy nothing but hot air.

TBH chocolate bar shouldn't be too large because you usually eat it as a whole. But chips, butter, chocolate etc. shouldn't be downsized. It's simply cheating
Aveeno hand lotion recently shrunk. They labeled the new bottle “new design” and changed the font and spacing. It’s looks so similar in size it fooled me.. but they reduced the amount of lotion you get.

I imagine the CEO signing off on the changes - impressed with the designers, such impressive CAD tooling Baumol would shed a tear.

Seems like I see sizes go up and down.

Slow shrinkflation, then one day "now bigger!" (with a price increase) and then repeat.

my childhood friend's grandparents were mars testers, their whole basement was full of mars bars!
A lot of my family worked at the Veghel, NL factory 60s to 90s (maybe some of them still do but I do not know); all got boxes of the stuff to take home. The shrinkflation started a long time ago, but, according to my old-uncles not as bad as it is now.
Sorry, whenever I see a reference to a Mars bar, I have to post https://totl.net/VisibleMars/
I bought a gatorade today after a run and it was 28oz. Pretty certain the big ones were 32oz for decades. I probably think this is a better size for me but pretty clear that is not why the change was introduced.
Gotta take making things away from the bean counters. Put product people back in charge, people who love what they make. "We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies." — Disney
Mars bar is not food, it is basically packaged trash. It fits well the place where it was found.

If you fed a lion the average American diet, it would die. And red meat isn't really the problem.

Don't kill yourself. Dont eat trash.

Im not sure how it remained in even the same shape after 35 years. I would assume if you left a mars bar on a shelf for a few years it would rot in some fashion.

I guess perhaps we put a lot of shit on our bodies

How can this be? I have been told all of my life that the market regulates itself and that is good for the consumer. So why don't we have bigger bars instead of smaller ones?
I sometimes think they even tasted better "back in the day". But not sure if its just kid tastebuds being new, VS current taste buds being critical.
The real question was whether it is still edible 35y later :D