WENDY KNOWLER | ‘Shrinkflation’ is not in your head: you’re getting less than what you paid for

Last weekend the New York Times published a feature on a man who is possibly the world’s go-to expert on shrinkflation and other forms of sneaky downgrading of products.

Edgar Dworsky and he’s is mad as hell that manufacturers of food and other household products manipulate the size of their packs as a sneaky means of passing on a price increase to consumers.

Having been exposing local shrinkflation examples long before I knew the term for it, I’m indebted to reader Hoosen Kolia for alerting me to the feature. I found it fascinating, of course. By the fourth paragraph I was muttering: “A kindred …!”

But Dworsky is in a whole different league, being obsessed with the global phenomenon, plus an allied, more sinister one which, I now know, is called “skimpflation” — that refers to the manufacturer practice of saving costs by diminishing the content of the most expensive ingredient and replacing it with a cheaper one.

That’s a lot more tricky to prove in most cases.

At the time he was interviewed by the New York Times, Dworsky was working on a case of diluted cough syrup. He writes up his discoveries on his website, mouseprint.org — a reference to the fine print often found on product packaging. In a recent report he focused on toilet paper shrinkflation, a category that many of the hundreds of readers who commented on the Times feature appeared to be similarly fixated on.

“Virtually every brand of toilet paper has been downsized over the years,” Dworsky wrote, documenting more than a decade of toilet paper shrinkage. An anal obsession, and justifiably so. American toilet rolls have shrunk in every way possible in recent years — they’ve got narrower, with fewer sheets and the quality has apparently been downsized, too.

Now 71, Dworsky worked with the Massachusetts attorney-general’s office in his heyday, before becoming a self-employed consumer advocate and shrinkflation guru.

Last month, two TV stations interviewed him about the downsizing of Halloween candy.

He’s a little eccentric, as many of my favourite people are. “He lives alone, has never been married, has no children and at one point, in jest, referred to his shrinkflation discoveries as his family,” the Times reported.

“All my children are my favourites,” he said. “It’s hard to single out one as the best.”

He told the Times how shrinkflation examples can be hard to spot, but he looks for clues such as “New and improved” on packaging. Most importantly, he examines the weight, because the visual size of the pack is deliberately designed to fool the consumer into believing nothing’s changed.

“Look at the products you buy all the time, note what the net weight is,” he advises. “When you go back to the store, double check that it’s still the same as your last bag, box or bottle.”

“Of course,” the Times noted, “manufacturers are free to change their product sizes at will.” As long as the weight or volume is correctly noted.

Look at the products you buy all the time, note what the net weight is. When you go back to the store, double-check that it’s still the same as your last bag, box or bottle

—  Edgar Dworsky, an expert on shrinkflation

They have to pass on their input costs to us or they’d go out business. But many Times readers have expressed in the comments section what I’ve long been saying — just do it honestly.

Increase the price on the existing pack; don’t try to sneak the increase through by means of a shrunken pack. The practice messes with recipes and inflation tracking, too.

“Richit” of Texas put it like this: “It’s a trust issue as much as an economic one. The Russians have a term, vyzama, that means lying to your face about something you know is a lie. It is a form of abuse.

“A discount is a sign of connection, an affection of a sort. This is the opposite: a betrayal.”

Bob of Cherry Valley said: “It’s not rising prices that’s the complaint ... it’s corporate dishonesty. Yes, consumers get mad at having to pay more, but they get really mad when they find out someone is trying to deceive them. That’s a violation of trust and an expression of contempt.”

Changing packaging design is an expensive exercise too — the cost of which consumers ultimately bear as well.

Here’s something else Mr Kolia alerted me to. In Brazil, when manufacturers downsize a pack they are legally compelled to alert consumers to this, with a bold declaration on the front of the pack for six months: the previous size, the current size and the percentage reduction.

Now there’s a campaign I could get behind! I don’t delude myself that this pack downsizing thing is going to stop. The trouble is that when one manufacturer does it, its competitors are forced to follow suit, sooner or later, because consumers don’t generally check unit prices (per kg or per 100g) to get a real sense of which product is cheapest.

They look at the selling price, often not realising they’re not only paying less for their chosen pack, they’re getting less too.

In March 2019 bacon brand Enterprise went big on alerting consumers that some of its competitors had reduced their pack sizes to 200g while its pack remained 250g. Then the Enterprise pack shrank to 200g. Of course it did.

All Gold did it, Coca-Cola did it, just about every pet food manufacturer has done it ... Tissues, toilet paper, tuna cans, chocolate slabs, soap bars, packets of chips, ice-cream ... the list is long.

Two examples stand out for me. In 2016, Mondalez, which owns the Toblerone brand, made the mistake of going too radical with shrinkflation-inspired redesign of its iconic bar.

They set those famous chocolate peaks so far apart that the bar resembled a bike rack.

So people took the wrapper off and immediately thought “What the …?” Four years earlier, Colgate-Palmolive reduced its Protex soap bar from 200g to 175g, but not by making the entire bar smaller. No, they just scooped 25g out of one side. So there was this big ugly dent in the bar of soap — something consumers only became aware of after purchase.

The company soon did away with the scooped-out bar and replaced it with a smaller but uniform 175g bar. And now its regular soap bar is just 150g. That would get Dworsky into a right froth.

• GET IN TOUCH: You can contact Wendy Knowler for advice with your consumer issues via e-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za or on Twitter: @wendyknowler

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