Factoring in 35 years of inflation. A $0.50 mars bar in 1991 is $1.21 today. The cost of a Mars bar today is at least $1.50 USD (after converting from UK pounds) and that’s being generous.
Companies are greedier than ever and there seems to be no stopping it (meaning because of the oligarchy in the US, Congress will never do a damn thing about it, and certainly the spoiled man-baby’s executive branch will do nothing about it), and no end in sight of it.
Fuck them all.
I would also be surprised if the cost of production, now using cheaper ingredients and far more automation, hadn’t also decreased.
Oh absolutely. Productivity has increased drastically since the 90s but wages never kept up.
Don’t say it in cop voice. Say:
workers engineers and scientists made everything drastically more productive and the pedophiles stole all the gains. We keep letting them.
We’re saying the same thing. The productivity surplus is getting stolen by the Epstein class. I’m not trying to sugarcoat anything.
I know. You were trained to say it in a way that contains linguistic ‘outs’ for boot lickers and disattributes the harm. Read back my post and look at the formatting.
Not to mention less cacao
Does infinite growth mean eternal shrinkflation? Will it ever plateau? Or collapse?
Shrinkflation implies a customer base that would either go elsewhere or without. I’m sure you’ve seen the efforts to eliminate all competition (establishing trusts, i.e. mega mergers) and weaseling into contracts like government that can’t be avoided.
When your audience has no choice, you have no limits.
That’s the official inflation numbers, which are lies. It’s an open secret that in the 90s there was a political movement among the owners to artificially lower reported inflation (see: Boskin Commission for example) because it would boost the economy (on paper) while letting them absorb the gains.
Underreporting by 1-2% a year doesn’t seem like much until you do it for several decades. Looking at actual inflation instead of the reported lie, that mars bar is closer to $2 today. Shrinkflation had to happen to keep the bigger con going. Most businesses will, of course, cheat the margins at every instance.
TLDR; shrinkflation is a symptom, not the disease
We’ve had the technology to stop this since 1791. Arguments about maturity could be made that put an industrial version as late as 1917.
That’s still over a century ago.
Even the font weight shrank
Back in the dialup days when brands were first coming online I used to have quite a thing for a Toffee Crisp. When I got a bar that was noticeably smaller than the last, I emailed them expecting a reply about market forces or cost of ingredients, but maybe they’d also send a voucher for a free bar or something.
Instead they tried to gaslight me, telling me they’d always been that size and that I must be imagining it. I was so put out by it that, other than a very occasional multi-pack for picnics, I haven’t bought a single-serve Toffee Crisp, Mars Bar, Snickers etc since.
When shrinkflation became a recognised term I felt so vindicated! I wish I still had that email so that I could shove it in their faces.
I saw a Curly Wurly in a shop the other day, and they’re now a pale imitation of what they were.
Here’s just the picture:
Damn those are some grippers
Also, recipe blogs are a great source of information on shrinkflation. Going to the store to look for a package size that no longer exists is fun.
I bet the ingredients are worse now too
That’s almost the worst part. Not only is the food ultra-processed now, but it’s all engineered to extract every fraction of a penny in margins.
If this goes on, I might as well just inject palm oil straight to my veins.It’s a weird thing to think about, but in a ship-of-Theseus sort of way a lot of the products we grew up with don’t really exist anymore. By that I mean, if it’s half the size and made of different ingredients then the Mars Bar as it was introduced has effectively been discontinued. There’s just some other, crappier knock-off being sold under the same name now.
Yep, really stretching the bounds of how far name recognition will get them. All of Christie’s products, Mondelez and most chocolate bars are barely even edible anymore. Forget the shrinkage, it’d be slop if they doubled the size.
Mondelez used to be a champion of quality but quarterly earrings erode all scruples.
I always had the feeling that they were 56% bigger when I was a kid.
You were just smaller then.
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Aww man, that was 10 years ago
Sorry to make you feel old, but it was in fact 20 years ago!
Got some bad news, y’all. I was born in 1996 and Im
3010 years oldThere’s a question to give a judge an aneurysm. How do age of consent laws work when time machines are involved?
I’m curious to see how different the ingredient lists are between the two.
When I was a kid, a pound of coffee was 16 ounces (US). Now it’s down to 12. They do it in small steps, so no one realizes it’s happening until you see something like this.
Enshittification is the word of the decade. Century?
I’d sign for enshittification being the worst thing that happens this century. Considering there are years 73 ahead of us in the century, it might only be the precursor of what will actually be the word of the century.
I think fascism is worse. I think Russia invading Ukraine is worse. I think the genocide by Israel of the Palestinians is worse. I think wealth inequality is worse. I think the lack of social safety nets in the US, especially universal heatlh case, is worse.
Enshittification is bad, but I really don’t think it’s the worst thing.
I could be wrong, but I believe the person to whom you replied was indicating that they would be okay with “enshittification” being the word of the century, because there are SO MANY worse things on the horizon or actively festering and spiraling out of control that, if “enshittification” is the worst thing to happen this century, that would be an acceptable outcome. I believe they were using “sign for” as in “to accept, as of a package or parcel”
Thanks, this I meant. And also, let’s hope it ends with enshittification and that it does not lead to hostile corporations sucking the world dry.
enshittification is the symptom of the underlying issue
Global warming is by far the worst thing but it leads to the same evil root of corporate greed.
Probably something like “Omnicide”, the way things are going.
And using it to describe everything is the enshitification of the word enshitification
enshittification is the new woke
woke and sheeple
If its the word of the millenium Im very curious where it goes…
Even the font got skinnier!
It had been at least 5 years since I bought myself a Snickers bar, I bought one about 2 months ago and I laughed my ass off at the shrinkflation size than that I remember, on the one hand you got Mars Inc. upping the price $.75c and shrinking it to whatever. On the OTHER hand, you actually got a reasonable portion to prevent over consuming empty calories/sugar.
Lose lose win win. Balance in the force.
Soon it’s just ars.
WRONG. It’ll be just the one Mar.
2087: a
I clearly remember they were 68 grams when I was a kid, which always weighed on my mind when I had to choose between a Mars bar and the 78 gram Oh Henry
