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In his State of the Union address last night, President Joe Biden took on a new symbolic foe: shrinkflation. In attacking the practice, he’s trying to signal that he’s aligned with the common American against corporate greed—even if it’s not clear what he can actually do about the problem.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Snack-Food Foes
Sesame Street characters have had their fuzzy fingers on the pulse of American life lately. First, Elmo triggered an avalanche of despair when he asked on X how everyone was doing. Then his castmate the Cookie Monster proclaimed earlier this week, “Me hate shrinkflation!”
In his punchy, confrontational State of the Union speech last night, Biden conveyed a similar feeling. After outlining his accomplishments and his plans for the economy, the president denounced the way snack-food makers have been putting fewer chips in each bag. “No, I’m not joking,” he said, as the audience laughed. “It’s called shrinkflation.”
What does this somewhat-jargon-y term mean, exactly? Shrinkflation refers to when companies shave the corner off a chunk of soap, for example, or pack less ice cream in a container (Biden has stewed about this one in particular) and still charge the same or higher prices. Companies that sell products such as chips and toilet paper can generally grow either by charging consumers more or by reducing their own costs, Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me. Companies are seeing that they’ve hit the ceiling on what consumers will pay, so they are turning to the strategy of offering less for the buyer’s dollar.
Although not entirely new, this practice has lately been irking consumers. And it has become a convenient target for Democratic politicians, Biden included. Chip quantities and Snickers packages might seem like random fixations for a president, but the high price of goods is playing an outsize role in voters’ views of the economy, which remain broadly negative despite the strength of recent indicators. Calling out shrinkflation deflects the blame for persistent inflation from policy makers to greedy companies, and it makes Biden look aligned with consumers against the threat of being ripped off. Nobody likes to feel misled—or to realize that a bag of chips is largely filled with air.
What Biden can actually do about the problem of shrinkflation, however, is not entirely clear. The president, to state the obvious, doesn’t exactly have authority over how many pieces of candy a private company wants to put in a pouch. Still, in his speech last night, Biden conveyed support for Senator Bob Casey’s bill to crack down on shrinkflation, which aims, among other things, to give more authority to the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to pursue action against companies that engage in shrinkflation. Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative, told me that the government could more strongly enforce existing laws about deceptive selling practices and work to further prohibit misleading tactics, including with stricter labeling rules. Owens, who supported Casey’s bill, argues that the onus of dealing with shrinkflation should fall on policy makers rather than on consumers.
Consumers are already starting to push back on shrinkflation: In recent months, Kodali explained, more shoppers have been jumping ship to cheaper brands. Kodali predicts that, within a year, companies will realize they are losing consumers and start changing their ways.
Biden’s candy-bar crusade may not be much more than political messaging for now. But it fits with a narrative he hammered home consistently in last night’s speech: that Donald Trump is a friend to the billionaires, in contrast to Biden’s own image as a friend to the working American. With shrinkflation, he’s hitting on an issue that riles up voters and matters to working people.
Related:
Today’s News
- Donald Trump posted a $91 million bond in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, the required amount to stay enforcement of the judgment while he continues his appeal.
- Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted in a New York federal court of charges including firearm offenses and conspiring with drug traffickers to facilitate the entry of tons of cocaine into the United States.
- Michael Whatley, a Trump-backed pick, and Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law, were selected to be the new leaders of the Republican National Committee.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
The ‘Secret’ Gospel and a Scandalous New Episode in the Life of Jesus
By Ariel Sabar
In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith, a newly hired Columbia University historian, traveled to an ancient monastery outside Jerusalem. In its library, he found what he said was a lost gospel. His announcement made international headlines. Scholars of the Bible would spend years debating the discovery’s significance for the history of Christianity. But in 1975, one of Smith’s colleagues went public with an extraordinary suggestion: The gospel was a fake. Its forger, the colleague believed, was Smith himself.
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Watch. Shōgun (out now on FX) is complicating Hollywood’s beloved samurai stereotype, Shirley Li writes.
Listen. The producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff has worked with a long line of pop stars. His band’s new album taps into the nostalgia that’s boosted his own success, Spencer Kornhaber writes.
Play our daily crossword.
P.S.
Though shrinkflation is not brand new (apparently American Airlines saved tens of thousands of dollars in the 1980s in a much-ballyhooed initiative to remove a single olive from its salads), it often falls out of popular consciousness. But for one Massachusetts man who has dedicated extensive efforts over the years to cataloging sneakily smaller packaging, the trend has remained top of mind. I recommend this 2022 profile of the man—Edgar Dworsky—for your weekend reading.
— Lora
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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