shrinkflation

Over the years many of us have commented that the food products we used to like have become noticeably smaller.  The shortbreads are smaller, the chocolate biscuits, the chocolate block, the soft drink, the Mars bar. The cereal inside the (big) packet  is a much smaller quantity.  Now we have a name for it — shrinkflation.  It’s not just food that is shrinking.  Furniture and houses are getting smaller too.

We have to thank a British economist, Pippa Malmgren, for this.  She used the word in a Tweet in 2015.  When later questioned she said that she thought that she had coined it — she hadn’t learnt it from someone else, and she definitely used it a lot.  We have belatedly discovered the term. It now has a variant, skimpflation, meaning the same thing.

This is another one in the set of terms derived from inflation.  There is stagflation (stagnant growth, high inflation), taxflation (bracket creep), foodflation (rise in food prices above inflation), and slumpflation (inflation with low productivity, low employment), and possibly others.