Less is more - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

In the devious and sinister world of rising cost-of-living prices, with much of the focus being on the price of groceries, the even more devious and even more sinister bit of the whole debate has been shrinkflation.

 

This word has come about in recent years as people have begun noticing that companies are stealthily and quietly, little by little, giving us less, but charging us more. Same cereal box or bag of chips - less cereal, fewer chips. Or, the boxes are getting a bit smaller. The weight of what you’re buying - say, a box of crackers - is just a few grams lighter than it used to be and, since you’re a person and not a scale used to measure weight in a drug house, you don’t realize it, because... how could you?

 

This practice is front and centre as grocery prices have soared. Canadians are thinking all the time about how awful it is that grocery store chains are exploiting those who are struggling to make ends meet and, furthermore, we’re not even getting as much “stuff” for that money as we used to.

 

A CBS News Moneywatch investigation back in October showed that shrinkflation has affected one third of grocery items. The worst offenders, according to the news outlet’s analysis, were those selling paper products like toilet paper, facial tissues and paper towels.

 

As a family with two young children, I know that Jess and I feel the pinch every weekend when we do our grocery shopping. It’s expensive to feed those little people we’ve created, in addition to all that goes into keeping the two of us alive as well. Having said that, we need to buy these things. There are very few splurges in our grocery carts, so we have to simply throw up our hands and realize that, as the great Martin Scorsese foretold in The Irishman, it is what it is.

 

Where I find that it’s really been sticking in my craw is on the non-essential purchases. It all depends on what you define as being non-essential, but I’m talking about things that provide entertainment, like streaming services for television, movies, sports and music. 

 

Spotify, for example, is how I listen to my music. And, as a music lover, I use it a lot. I use it all day, every day here at the office and a lot at home or in the car. I used to have a solo membership that was under $10 per month. It’s important to mention here, however, that there used to be (and maybe still is) a free version of Spotify, supported by advertising, with certain limitations. The push to pay for a premium membership with Spotify - back then - was to remove all limitations (listen to any and all songs when and in what order you want to listen to them) and be freed of advertisements.

 

As someone who pays his bills on the strength of advertising revenue, I am not here to cast aspersions on the role of advertising. If you pay for something with the promise of skipping advertising because you’re providing the revenue that would have otherwise been provided by advertising, you should get what you pay for. Now, with a family membership that has seen its price creep up year after year, I am paying over $21 per month for Spotify. And, guess what? Advertising is back. So, paying double and listening to advertisements that I paid to skip is a form of shrinkflation. 

 

The rest of streamers are following suit with services like Netflix, Disney Plus and more, with annual price increases and ad-supported versions, bringing back the exact thing they sold themselves on eliminating. 

 

What we’re paying for is being rolled back and there’s nothing we can do about it. Our cruel corporate overlords will tell us how much we’ll get and what we’ll pay for it.