Shrinkflation: what is it? The incredible shrinking Cadbury’s Christmas selection. Now there’s skimpflation, too.

Shrinkflation and inflation are in the news again. We’ve all heard of inflation before, but ‘shrinkflation‘? In the BBC’s Broadcasting House on Sunday 28 November, in the section on newspaper headlines, John Timpson, the owner of the high-street ‘cobbling’ chain, mentioned that Cadbury’s Christmas selection box will contain 24 grams of chocolate less than three years ago. And apparently – shock! horror! – according to the Mail on Sunday, this is the third year such shrinkflation has happened.

And there’s a new –flation in the -flation brood: skimpflation.  

What is shrinkflation?

Self-evidently, it’s a combination of shrink + (in)flation. What it refers to is a kind of closet inflation or inflation by stealth: manufacturers don’t put the price of a good up, which would constitute real price inflation, but instead reduce the size of the good.

In simple terms, you get less stuff for the same amount of dosh, less bang for your buck. 

Have you noticed it with anything you regularly buy? I bet you have. We notice it regularly, from biscuits to crisps to mince pies – which makes our diet sound terribly unhealthy, but, I rush to re-assure you, it isn’t. 

Some might think shrinkflation cons the consumer. Presumably, the logic driving it is that most people would be put off by a clear price rise but won’t necessarily notice the reduction in size. 

Skimpflation

This has been suggested as a word to describe changes to services which save the providers money. For instance, at Disneyland, Disney no longer provides a free tram service from car parks to the venue entrances. Other forms might be reduced breakfast options in hotels, or slower service, or longer waiting times when calling call centres. I’ve certainly noticed that last one.

When the pandemic was at its height, you could accept that there were difficulties finding enough fit staff, but now such slowness seems built into the system. Presumably, companies are either deliberately employing fewer people or having problems finding staff. Another example I’d give is the glossy magazine I used to get twice a year from the makers of my car. Now it’s all online, thereby saving hugely in production and distribution costs. 

Other -flations

Shrinkflation is only the latest of inflation’s spawns. Best known is probably stagflation (1965) which is, according to the OED, ‘A state of the economy in which stagnant demand is accompanied by severe inflation’.

The first citation it gives is by the Conservative politician, Shadow Chancellor and very briefly Chancellor Iain Macleod, who is indeed credited with having coined the term:

‘We now have the worst of both worlds — not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other, but both of them together. We have a sort of “stagflation” situation. And history, in modern terms, is indeed being made.’

slumpflation

Less familiar, at least to me, is slumpflation: ‘A state of economic depression in which decreasing output and employment in industry are accompanied by increasing inflation’.

The first OED citation is by the journalist and quondam1 editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg (yes, the pater of our very own Jacob Rees-Mogg) from his 1974 book The Reigning Error: The Crisis of World Inflation. Whether that means he coined the word, I do not know.

deflation

The opposite of inflation is deflation, which in economic terms means, so the OED tells me, ‘The action or process of deflating currency; an economic situation characterized by a rise in the value of money and a fall in prices, wages, and credit, usually accompanied by a rise in unemployment’.

Wikipedia explains it further as follows, which helps me, an economic illiterate, understand it a bit better:
‘In economics, deflation is a decrease in the general price level of goods and services. Deflation occurs when the inflation rate falls below 0% (a negative inflation rate). Inflation reduces the value of currency over time, but deflation increases it. This allows one to buy more goods and services than before with the same amount of currency. Deflation is distinct from disinflation, a slow-down in the inflation rate, i.e. when inflation declines to a lower rate but is still positive.’

The Great Depression of the 1930s was preceded by a period of deflation, and the more recent economic crisis (2008) also featured a certain amount of it.

What is the -flation of inflation, stagflation, etc?

The –ation part is the normal Latinate way of deriving nouns from verbs in English. As it happens, inflation directly mirrors Latin inflātiō-nem in form if not in meaning.2 Inflate comes from Latin inflāre ‘to blow into’. Now, often English takes one part of a word to create others, e.g. telethon from marathon, and the part used has no etymological validity as a meaningful part of the original word – and it doesn’t matter that it hasn’t. The Latin parent of inflate consists of in + flāre, to ‘blow into’, and while the verb flāre exists there is no related noun flātiō-nem in Latin. Had it existed, it would have meant ‘a blowing’, I suppose, whereas the English-flation does not have that meaning at all but bequeaths to the words that it helps form a clear signal that they are related conceptually to inflation.

And what about the word inflation?

It’s been in English since the fourteenth century. Not in the meaning we’re looking at here, but as ‘The condition of being inflated with air or gas, or of being distended or swollen as if with air’, e.g.

It purges þe longes of inflacioun. (the lungs)

Rolle, Psalter, before 1340.

Charles Darwin used it similarly almost exactly five centuries later in 1839:

By the inflation of its body, the papillæ, with which the skin is covered, become erect and pointed.

Darwin in R. Fitzroy & C. Darwin Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s ships Adventure and Beagle, between the years 1826 and 1836 III. i. 14

Among its several other meanings, inflation can also signify  ‘The quality of language or style when it is swollen with big or pompous words; turgidity, bombast’:

A style which to an English reader will appear to border on inflation and bombast.

Beaumont tr. Barthelemi Travels of Anacharsis in Greece (1796) I. p. vi, 1791

Only in 1838 did the meaning we are concerned with appear:  ‘An undue increase in the quantity of money in relation to the goods available for purchase; (in lay use) an inordinate rise in prices’:

The property pledge can have no tendency whatever to prevent an inflation of the currency.

D. Barnard Speeches & Rep.195, 1838

And just as we know who ‘invented’ stagflation (Iain Macleod) so the British economist Pippa Malmgren is credited with coining shrinkflation in 2015, at least in the meaning discussed in this blog.

Note: This is an updated version of a post originally published a couple of years ago

1 I don’t often get the chance to use quondam, meaning ‘former’ or ‘one-time’. But then it raises the question: does the person so described have to be alive to qualify?

2 In Latin it seems that inflātĭo referred to a literal swelling. Cicero writes habet inflationem magnam is cibus (faba) Literally, ‘This food has a great swelling’, the food in question being faba, i.e. broad beans or faba beans, eschewed historically by Pythagoreans and currently by anyone who wishes not to alienate old friends.