Shrinkage: Remember when a pound was a pound, and a half-gallon was half-gallon?

This post was going to be 1,000 words, but in keeping with its theme, I decided to shrink it to 700. This is not to shortchange my subscribers, whom I love (especially the paying ones, and you know who you are). It’s only to channel what I want to get into today, which is the ongoing shrinkage that American grocery shoppers are being subject to. It doesn’t matter whether you get your food at Wegmans in Buffalo or Ralph’s in Los Angeles or Publix in Raleigh. Or Kroger’s in Columbus. Or ShopRite in Hackensack. Have you noticed that many of your favorite products are getting smaller before your eyes? It has been going on for years, but to this shopper (someone who clips coupons, stocks up on specials and always – always – keeps close tabs on when Hellmann’s is on sale), it seems to be approaching epidemic proportions. So much so that this phenomenon has a name:

Shrinkflation.

I’ve never cared for manufactured words, and this one is particularly gnarly. It’s ugly and hard to say. You have to work to figure out what it means. But the sad truth is that Shrinkflation is a thing. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and many other non-shrinking publications have written about it, and effectively turned it into a legit term, whether I like it or not. So what is Shrinkflation? It is the label given to the money-grubbing practice of major food companies – looking at you, Kraft, General Mills and Frito-Lay – to trick consumers into thinking that they are really and truly on your side. They do this not by raising prices, but by shrinking what you get for your buck. Which is the same thing, except that they don’t want you to think of it that way.

I grew up in a household where the go-to coffee was Chock Full O’ Nuts, a yellow and black 16-ounce can that was a pantry staple for my entire childhood. Then, one day, I can’t tell you exactly when, I picked up the Chock Full O’ Nuts can and it seemed different. Lighter. I wasn’t all the worked up about it, until I looked more closely at the label and saw that the can contained 13 ounces of coffee. Not 16, which was the standard amount since people discovered coffee. But did the Chock Full people didn’t stop there? No, no. no. The can subsequently shrunk to 11.5 ounces, and now some of those cans can be as small as 10.3 ounces, depending on the variety you select. That is a lot of beans you are not getting.

 Browse the grocery aisles and you will find shrinkage everywhere you look. Another family favorite, Nabisco graham crackers (red box only; honey flavored doesn’t cut it), used to be 16 ounces and is now 14.4 ounces. I always thought Breyer’s vanilla ice cream was the best, and our family would buy it by the half-gallon. We don’t do that anymore because the half-gallons no longer exist, having been reduced to a quart and a half – 48 ounces. If you are scoring at home, that is a 25 percent reduction in how much Breyer’s you get for the buck. It’s one of the most glaring examples of shrinkflation, right up there with diminishing Dannon yogurt, formerly a full 8 ounces, and now offered to you at 5.3 ounces, same as Chobani.

What really irks me is that the companies go to great lengths to re-design their shrinking containers/packages/boxes in a way that many consumers hardly even notice. Hellmann’s mayo, my favorite all-time condiment, had gone from 32 ounces to 30 for years before I noticed it on a label one day. It made me want to fire off a letter to the parent company, Unilever, and ask them where my 2 ounces of Hellmann’s (Best Foods west of the Rockies) went. The companies count on you not noticing. As John Gourville, a professor at Harvard Business School, told the New York Times, consumers typically fixate much more on price than size.

 “People might notice (when products shink), but often, they don’t,” Gourville said. “You don’t get sticker shock.”

So maybe the next time you want to quench your thirst with a 28-ounce bottle of Gatorade (formerly 32 ounces) and snack on a 9.25-0unce bag of Doritos (formerly 9.75 ounces), you will be aware that less is not more in the food business. And reportedly a Frito-Lay spokesperson didn’t try to deny it, saying, “we took just a little bit out of the bag so we can give you the same price, and you can keep enjoying your chips.”