Shrinkflation

Real or imagined?

Consumers and the media get very annoyed when popular brands – usually chocolate – are reduced in size to hide what can only be described as a price increase.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS), not usually known as a purveyor of trendy terminology, refers to this as Shrinkflation and goes into great depth with its definitions.

“If products shrink in size, inflation rises even if prices stay constant, as consumers pay the same amount of money for less [of the product],” says ONS economist Nadezhda Ochirova, author of a report on Shrinkflation.