(Back in 2019, in JESS & IMA TALK -in the segment called ‘the Phool’s viewpoint on Inflation”…this subject was posted; here they are again!)
IMA: Jess, I just heard a media report where the word “Shrinkflation” was used to describe what we talked about in 2019 on our blog (see note above). I laughed out loud and said, “Well, they finally caught up with us, and are using a name I’d never heard of.“
JESS: Did they sound excited, like they’d just discovered something?
IMA: Yep, so I looked up the word and found out that an American economist, named Pippa Malgrem, had coined that word in 2009. Imagine that!
JESS: We’d been talking about the definition of inflation way before we decided to even create a blog, because we kept hearing the media talking heads telling everyone, there was no such thing as “inflation”.
IMA: It’s good to know that we weren’t out of our heads when we became so aware that amounts were shrinking while prices either stayed the same or increased.
JESS: Yep, manufacturers played it slick, by making the packaging look the same, while decreasing the amount of the content; even changed the shapes of bottles so it looked like the volumes were the same even though the sides had been flattened, to “make the bottles easier to hold”.
IMA: Well, a whole lots of folks we know weren’t fooled, even those who are not named “Phool”!