Regarding shrinkflation: Good thing or bad?

Shrinkflation in action!

One of the core traits of modern marketing is deceit. Marketers are all now experts at the cognitive biology and social behavior of deceit and creating illusions. They're superb at what they do to get us to buy on the basis of as much illusion as their magic can conjure. Recently, consumer inflation has sparked a massive marketing movement in shrinkflation. The NYT comments on the current phenomenon:

A few weeks ago, Edgar Dworsky got a promising tip by email. “Diluted cough syrup,” read the message, accompanied by a photo of two packages of syrup with a curious difference: The new one appeared to be half the strength of the old one.

Mr. Dworsky gets emails like this frequently, alerting him to things like a bag of dog food that discreetly shrank from 50 pounds to 44 pounds. A cereal box that switched from “giant” to “family” size and grew about an inch taller — but a few ounces lighter. Bottles of detergent that look the same, but the newer ones come with less detergent.

The cough syrup message looked intriguing. Mr. Dworsky made plans to investigate.
He has dedicated much of his life to exposing what is one of the sneakier tricks in the modern consumer economy: “shrinkflation,” when products or packaging are subtly manipulated so that a person pays the same price, or even slightly more, for something but gets less of it.  

Consumer product companies have been using this strategy for decades. And their nemesis, Mr. Dworsky, has been following it for decades. He writes up his discoveries on his website, mouseprint.org, a reference to the fine print often found on product packaging. Print so tiny “only a mouse could read,” he says. 

He writes about shrinkflation in everything — tuna, mayonnaise, ice cream, deodorant, dish soap — alongside other consumer advocacy work on topics like misleading advertising, class-action lawsuits and exaggerated sale claims.

One recent Mouse Print report explored toilet paper shrinkflation. “Virtually every brand of toilet paper has been downsized over the years,” Mr. Dworsky wrote, documenting more than a decade of toilet paper shrinkage.

If one puts on one's philosopher's hat, one can ask the question of whether shrinkflation is good, bad, ambiguous, boring or something else. On the one hand, the tactic keeps consumers buying and feeling better than if they knew they had been tricked. Maybe the economy would collapse if shrinkflation went away. On the other hand, maybe consumers would be better off realizing what is going on around them. On the third hand, maybe consumers would not be better off realizing what is going on around them. 

Shrinkflation is a deep philosophical conundrum. 

By Germaine: The philosopher-lite wearing a philosopher hat (while cross-dressing)