We used to buy half gallons and gallons of ice cream. Brands started selling 60 or 62 ounces instead of 64. Over the years, it’s gotten to where some brands sell 48 ounces - three pints - instead of 64.
Breakfast cereals have had similar shrinking sizes.
Price-conscious shoppers still buy the smaller thing if it's cheaper per oz (and only if the stores show the price per oz on the shelf), but most people just get the bigger size because that's how much they want to consume, and they can't really tell that the 15% increase in size does not equate to 19% increase in cost.
Many stores would stock the family size separate from the regular size so the shoppers couldnt easily compare price per oz.
Eventually the family size just becomes the regular size, but now at the higher price. Then the shrinking happens again.
Legal requirement that they do in the UK (though in metric units), so it's £/L and £/Kg (or for smaller items per 100g and then some nuance on unit prices for things not sold by weight/volume).
It does make their shenanigans with multipacks and such way more obvious by design.
> The PMO also requires traders, where applicable, to display the ‘unit price’ – which is the price which would be charged for the relevant unit of the goods, depending upon how the goods are sold. Unit pricing can be a useful tool for consumers. It allows consumers to compare the price and value of similar products. This can be helpful when making a decision between similar products that are sold in different sizes or quantities.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/price-marking-ord...
Or another being "Made in USA", where Usa was a city in Korea.
Which as a highlander I don’t see the need for - Japanese whiskey is quite able to stand in its own and hold its own.
This tricks don't work any more.
https://www.trademarkia.com/100-pure-all-american-beef-73352...
It could be 99% filler and not be a lie.
There is no evidence that McDonalds has included any filler in their burgers at all (at least in recent history). See the link in the cousin-comment for more information on what has been claimed and what has been proven (so far): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247943
But the claim isn't about "the beef portion". If what you say is true it would give a competitor the chance to say "McD's burgers are 100% unhealthy fat" because the unhealthy fat portion is 100% unhealthy fat.
> It could be 99% filler and not be a lie.
I doubt it. Not sure about the US but in Europe there are laws that tell you how much or how little of something you can have before you advertise that thing. For example you can't say "now with less sugar" if you reduced the quantity of sugar by 0.001g. And you can't call it "olive oil" if it has 2% olive oil.
Which is still way too lax. It should only be called olive oil when it's 100% olive oil. You can pick some other name like "olive oil based" or "unholy mixture of the cheapest gutter oils we could find" which clearly indicates that what you are selling is in fact a combination of oils.
For olive oil you can find the details here [2]. As above, there's no such thing as "the olive oil part was olive oil". The label is for the product.
The US probably has something similar, even if watered down.
[1] https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/labelling-and-nutritio...
[2] https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/farming/crops/olive-oil_en
Note that this is the most charitable interpretation where the customer deception is fairly minor(inflation happens, gotta sneak that price increase in there some how) Stuff like deceptive packaging(make it look like there is more than is actually present) punts it into the outright evil category.
ultimately the company is taking part in the government's goal to keep a certain level of inflation, rather than just its own desire to screw customers and make the number go up. If the government wasnt in on it, there would be regulations around shrinkflation
Higher prices -> customer unhappy -> less sales -> stock price go down
Smaller bars -> hopefully customer doesn't notice -> same sales -> stock OK
That's the only logic in here. The prices of the ingredients have gone up, so they're forced with that choice.
Companies don't like losing customers, and loyal customers who like certain products do not like being forced to choose between two "less full" sized products, or one product this week and two next week (or whatever; imagine being able to buy either a bottle of cold brew or a carton of creamer, OR simply having to settle for less of both).
Keeping the price roughly similar might seem like a scam but if you're some random person who really really feels their day sucks without something, would you like being priced out of it instead of disciplining yourself without any interference to merely have it a day or two less per week?
I am pretty sure few people really believe they are getting the same amount after a week or two of that smaller cereal box or whatever.
1) they're colluding to do this, or more accurately that they don't have to collude to do this, since the brands have all been bought up by monopolies. Shrinkflation would be obvious if it sat next to the original products on the shelves. Instead, Mars or Unilever etc. own almost entire categories of food and control how they are shelved.
2) They aren't being regulated to make the distinction clear to customers, and even allowed to intentionally obscure it by doing things like blowing more air into a less full chip bag, and
3) the fact that modern food companies are simply holding companies for portfolios of historic trademarks that they can use to trade on the history of those brands while cheapening the ingredients.
On 3), we've long since arrived in a period when the generic is usually better than the brand name, because the generic has to compete on cost for value, and the brand has assumed value from the brand-loyal that allows the ingredients to be cheapened without losing customers. It's the brand that is premium, not what's in the package.
I actually think the metric system offered a bit of concealment on shrinkflation - things were once sold in standard unit sizes, and sometimes selling them (especially the fancy ones) in metric unit sizes got people used to seeing strange long decimal standard unit sizes in things they were used to buying by the pound or the quart.
Gallons of milk didn't shrink, but I think the fact that a lot of us were drinking fancy imported coffees gave those room to go crazy with bag sizes. The flour I buy is still in a 5lb bag, but if flour sellers all decided to go 2 kilos one day at the same price, a lot of people wouldn't notice (or would get used to it.)
And you also sometimes get different units being used for related products. And of course then there are cases the the amount of product is not the relevant unit for price comparison because different competitor formulas need different amounts for the same effect. Still plenty of tricks that unscrupulous companies can use in the EU.
- We are changing the price from X to Y. [tirade about rising prices]
Maybe they should hang this in the restaurant:
- The THING is now smaller than January 2026. [And it’s your fault. You misers don’t want higher prices? Well have you heard of the Central Bank? ...]
That last part is optional.
The consumer is the last part in the value chain of cow to beef patty so of course he or she just has himself or herself to blame.
The pricing of normal raw food products, produce etc. is generally quite transparent.
Plus, nowadays, a "justice" system which might well decide that Badguys Inc. has a First Amendment Right to label and sell 10 1/2 oz. of inspection-failing mystery meat as "1 Pound Pure Prime Beef".
My go-to example: your local hairdresser may keep the same prices (adjusted for the official inflation or otherwise), but over the years, they may have stopped serving coffee and started offering only water. The salon used to be beautiful and stylish, and now looks dirty and furnished with cheapest bargain-bin business store furniture. Flowers are gone or replaced with cheap plastics. Toilets never have toilet paper in it, faucet always leaking. Waiting room sofas got replaced with cheap chairs. Even the magazines are gone, and in their place you just get leaflets. Etc.
Repeat the same for your local grocery store, parking lot, car dealership, bus stop, airport, cinema, everything.
The second half of the inflation is literally everywhere, in everything - it can be easily seen once you start looking for it. And after that, you can't unsee it.
computers i think are more affordable now than even 20 years ago, in bang for buck
20 years is too long in the past, so indeed computers were more expensive then.
But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.
2011 was actually the last year when I bought a computer with only 16 GB of DRAM, but today I hope to not need a computer any time soon, because I would not be able to buy as much memory as I want and as much memory as I have in my old computers, bought at a time when they were much cheaper than today.
Not only DRAM, SSDs and HDDs have exploded in price, but also the mini-PCs with Intel or AMD CPUs have a double price than last year, when bought as barebones, without memory.
For now, it is not obvious how much the prices have increased, because there are on the market a lot of obsolete computers that have remained unsold from the previous years, and which are cheap, but if you would want an up-to-date model that would be a true upgrade over whatever old computer you have, then the price is steep. (That means that for example in the case of barebone mini-PCs you can find cheap models with Intel Arrow Lake H or AMD Zen 4 CPUs, e.g. around $500, but the corresponding models with Panther Lake or Zen 5 are double in price, e.g. around $1000.)
Some of the individual components may still be relatively expensive, but overall I don't think this is true at all. Compare a 2026 macbook pro with a 2011 macbook pro at a similar price and the 2026 model is gonna blow the 2011 model out of the water on any benchmark you care to use.
a 2011 laptop will likely perform the same on this metric with a contemporary website. (a 2011 website with a 2011 laptop, and a 2026 laptop with a 2026 website).
“how long it takes to load the mail app and send a mail”
probably the 2011 laptop out performs on this metric.
I’m sure the modern laptop is a few times more powerful in terms of raw compute, but lets not confuse compute with utility, because better laptops should mean more capabilities, not more shitty developer harnesses to make the same programs we had before.
Graphics processing is beat by any new laptop or even a phone, but good old processing power can load a web site in the same time.
One common thing I've experienced is browser-based video conferencing. A lot of chips in that generation didn't really have a lot of hardware accelerated video codecs, so a number of things have to rely on pure software and thus really crank the CPU. Meanwhile a cheap modern mobile chip can handle those same video streams without even breaking a sweat, due to having accelerators for those video codecs.
I know it's all "back in my day" but back in my day (15 years ago) everything was generally software so the laptop was computing more, now everything is a website but the laptops need 32GB to not run like through tar.
Both of my arm MacBook pros hang from time to time doing basic tasks. It's ridiculous and at least one nice side effect of a ram shortage might be developers starting to care about memory footprint again
Anytime I look in Task Manager "Anti-malware Service Executable" is pegging at least one CPU core.
It happens that i just upgraded my main computer and phone, from >10 years old to >3 years old. And certainly I'm conscious of the fact that if I'd done this a year or even 6 months ago I'd have saved maybe 15% over what I paid. On the other hand, I'm also very conscious of that fact that the new gear is far more performant; the RAM is faster, the memory bus is wider, the system architecture is massively more efficient, there's specialized logic that just doesn't exist on my older machines. So I think it's a big mistake to say 'xGB of RAM costs the same now as 15 years ago' when it's performing ~10x beter.
Uhm, in 2011 4 GB RAM was the standard for PCs (some were still sold with only 2 GB), 8 GB was already enthusiast territory. 16 GB was a professional workstation.
Nowadays you get a cpu that's 10% every 2 years (or every 4 if you don't take into account amd 3d cache parts) and a gpu that is basically the same with better RT performance (unless you pay an obscene amount of cash for the nvidia top of the line).
Second hand market is way worse as parts last longer being relevant and prices in retail and second hand markets go up as result. Put on top of that a crypto frenzy followed by an AI frenzy and the DIY market has been in a dark age for a decade.
I'd say a pc you buy today is more performant for the price than one bought 10 years earlier. But 10 years earlier you could get yourself something very nice for 500 bucks and today you just can't do that as entry level everything starts at like 700 bucks or more.
https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/first-quarter-2026-average-air-...
Your link shows charts that include airfare prices integrated with inflation. That's closer to the kind of charts that we're used to seeing when inflation comes up. But it doesn't say which Consumer Price Index (there are many!) was used for adjustment, so that's annoying; it's hard to establish what it means exactly. It's also lacking in granularity and history.
---
I usually find that FRED is better for this stuff. The generated charts include citations for source data and also whatever maths were used in the final presentation.
Here's a chart from FRED of airfare price index over time, adjusted by inflation using the usual All Items, Urban Consumers price index. (There's some error included here since that latter index includes transportation and transportation includes airfare, but it seems like that's in the realm of 1% or so and I can only work with the tools that I have.)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XRwq
The vertical scale set so that 100 = June 1, 2026 because that's what I picked (but anyone can pick a different date for 100 using the Edit Graph link; the shape of the line stays the same).
Anyway, it shows that flights are pretty cheap ~right now. The data doesn't show that it's cheaper-than-ever (that happened in May of 2020), but it's pretty darned cheap anyway even with the ongoing war in Ukraine and the stuff that has been going on in Iran.
What's different about computers that makes this applicable here?
If a sign says “No parking on saturdays”, that is an exception that can be used to infer the rule “parking here is okay the rest of the time”.
It's one of those terms where I am pretty confident that I see the original use more rarely than the technically incorrect variations to the point I'd hesitate to call them incorrect any more.
So no, OP used the correct definition and no wide spread usage uses ~Q=>~P. That's a weird logical formulation that was randomly concocted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
Said another way:
Rule: It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
Exception: computers i think are more affordable now than even 20 years ago, in bang for buck
This proves the rule because if it's an exception to the rule, therefore the rule must exist in the first place.
Poster 1: everything is worse
Poster 2: but compute has gotten better
Poster 3: that’s the exception to the rule that everything has gotten worse, proving the rule exists
Everything has been spreadsheeted to death.
> I don't know what they put into pizza "dough" but it's not real flour.
Some clever fellow decided to shave a nickel by padding their shredded parmesan with sawdust and now the other brands of parmesan have "No cellulose!" on the label as if that is a selling point. Which it is, now, alas.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/17/parmesa...
In the best case, you might have had chalk added to whiten your bread. In worse cases, alum..
https://www.cooksinfo.com/flour-grades
excerpt:
"French bakers will use straight flour in their bread making; North Americans and British generally don’t.
"Straight flour is separated by sifting in other grades. The straight flour is passed along a roller over different sieves. Different grades fall through the appropriate sieve along the roller. In the percentages given below, the lower the percentage of straight flour that falls through a particular grading sieve, the more desirable the flour."
Shelf life, reduced calories, ease of working with, etc, etc. Basically all those secondary goals you optimize for once it's a given that the pizza will pizza properly.
While I've no doubts shrinkflation explains a great deal of this, it would be interesting if increased mandatory food content reporting on packaging had even a small effect on reducing the calorie content of confectionery over time, as consumers could more easily compare etc and market responded with products in portion sizes to better fit preferences.
You can even see in the article photo, the more recent modern Mars bar has the calorific content printed on the front, in addition to the big label all UK food has on the rear. The 1991 example does not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Gulp
Even bigger sizes arrived in the 1980s:
Called Big Gulp because it was initially the largest such drink available at any retailer, 7-Eleven eventually introduced larger sizes. In 1986, they introduced the 44-US-fluid-ounce (1,300 ml) Super Big Gulp, followed by the 64-US-fluid-ounce (1,900 ml) Double Gulp in 1989 (later reduced to 50-US-fluid-ounce (1,500 ml))...
"Super Size" was a 90's thing as well, if I recall. It was basically an arms race of which company could provide the most ridiculously large portions of a cheap product like soda or fries.
Then the PR swung in the 00's due to the obesity epidemic and such stuff was silently rolled back. Likely for both PR and cost reasons. The 32oz drink stuck around though pretty much everywhere.
I only moved to the US ~10 yrs ago and quite unfamiliar with US in 80s/90s
It's an easy thing to promote more of to divert attention while reducing something else that actually costs money to make.
Or why portions of fries go up when burgers go down in size. Cheapest food item.
Except Blue Bell, who use a bright banner on their packaging to call out "Still 1/2 Gal!".
https://www.nytimes.com/1958/03/26/archives/u-s-issues-an-ic...
The term "ice cream" is pretty well regulated in the US. Really shows where our priorities are as Americans.
Most natural food products are regulated in the US [0]. Ice cream is not unique in this regard, nor is the standard is particularly onerous compared to others. It easily fits on single page [1].
0: https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards
1: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/IceCreamI...
It is interesting to me though that we make such a big point to regulate even things like "ice cream" and "potato chip" with labeling regulations but then so much else of our food industry seems to be pretty open. There aren't requirements of what a "chocolate chip cookie" is, for instance.
Not that I'm arguing for repealing the regulations we have currently, I do like to know the "ice cream" I'm buying meets these minimum standards.
And if they're making a product like that, where else would you prefer for that to be put? In between the porkchops and the steaks? Maybe between the crackers and the chips?
I don't quite get where you're going with this other than to suggest they shouldn't even be allowed to make such a thing at all and sell it in stores.
Particularly when its something like Breyer's light - its literally sold next to the Ice cream equivalent from Breyers and is designed to be ice cream in all but density requirements. Most people would call it ice cream and never know its designed to trick them into accepting something that is lesser quality for the same price.
As to where I'm going with it - well I'm just pointing out another form of the stupid shit. I can't wait to see how you flip out when I point out all the ways that they try to trick people into believing they are buying meat.
Maybe people sometimes do want the stuff loaded with fudge and candy bars and cake crumbles and whipped to nearly the consistency of whipped cream? Maybe sometimes people don't mind the tradeoff of it being whipped more so it still satisfies similar cravings and desires while being less calories per bite?
I don't exactly see why its "the stupid shit" and makes people less human to concoct such things. I say let them have their fun, just make sure its actually labeled if things are "ice cream" or not, as I usually prefer the basic "ice cream". Once again, should these products just not be allowed to be sold at all? What changes to their labeling do you think are needed? Are they not allowed to actually show the product at all on the label or something?
And yeah, it makes sense to stick the Breyers products next to the Breyers products. Once again where else would they put it? Wouldn't it be a bit more of PITA if the Breyers products were just kind of randomly strewn all over the place? You're seeing such negativity and bringing so much hatred for what seems to be like pretty obvious placement decisions. Ice cream like things are all around each other, similar brand products are grouped together. Are you also upset that sorbets are usually right next to the ice cream?
It's simple - people will think these things are ice cream, because they are sold in a way to intentionally make them easy to mistake for ice cream with the goal of blurring the lines reducing product cost without people noticing they are getting an inferior substitute. It's similar to (but distinct from) lowering the amount of goods in a box without reducing the size of the box (shrinkflation), with a similar goal.
> Maybe people sometimes do want the stuff loaded with fudge and candy bars and cake crumbles and whipped to nearly the consistency of whipped cream?
You're really stuck on this - I specifically pointed out Breyers light vanilla, which is not this at all. In fact, nearly everyone served this would just call it ice cream, and evidenced in this very thread where someone stated "theres so much air whipped into ice cream these days". That's the point.
> And yeah, it makes sense to stick the Breyers products next to the Breyers products.
Nabisco cracker products are in a whole different aisle than Nabisco cookie products. More relevantly, Nabisco saltines are with the other brand saltines, not on the same shelf as cheeze-its. You see Kraft mayo in the mayo section, and kraft mustard in the mustard section of the condiments aisle. I think its reasonable to put Breyers ice cream in an ice cream section and Breyer's light in a frozen-desert section of the freezer aisle, and not at all obvious why they aren't.
> I don't exactly see why its "the stupid shit" and makes people less human to concoct such things
The people who concoct them are fine. The ones who are less than human are the ones who use tricks to fool people into thinking they are ice cream. I mean even the name in the example "Breyers Light" - most things that are "light" are the same product with less sugar or fat or salt not a wholly different thing (e.g. Bud light is still beer (cue jokes from the beer snobs)) - are another trick to lead to confusion because its no longer ice cream.
I'm not the one calling people non-human and using terms like "the stupid shit" and assuming conspiracies that can easily be described with logically sorting like items. I'm just really trying to understand the mind of someone so angry about people enjoying different kinds of deserts and so the makers of those desires are now inhuman for sticking their frozen dairy products in the frozen dairy section.
> I think its reasonable to put Breyers ice cream in an ice cream section and Breyer's light in a frozen-desert section of the freezer aisle
Wouldn't that be immediately next to and surrounding the "ice cream" subsection? Like maybe novelties, frozen dairy deserts, ice cream, sorbets, that sound reasonable? Wouldn't you then logically put the brands like Breyers that make both kinds of products at the edge of the "ice cream" and the "frozen dairy desert" section? Isn't having them be the border of both sections then still the same end result you're dehumanizing people over? Should the government be required to have these products separated by 15 feet and have big flashing warning lights announcing the separation of those sections? How much separation do you require to meet your standards?
Are their frozen dairy deserts really the same level is dissimilar as ketchup is to mustard? Or are they essentially just like different "flavors" of the same base concept? Personally I (and I imagine many other people) could just swap a "real ice cream" for a "frozen dairy desert" and probably not care too much, but if I put mustard in something calling for ketchup or vice-versa it's definitely not going to end up the same!
That conspiracy doesn't make sense given that flour is probably the cheapest ingredient in a pizza besides water. You'd have a hard time finding something cheaper, not to mention hiding it (either from the ingredients list, or from your conspirators)
Also, based on the statement, you're buying shit pizza from trash restaurants/frozen garbage. That's why the crust is bad. Pizza is one of the cheapest things you can make, that's why when I worked in restaurants I always said if you can't make money selling pizza you need to get out of the industry.
Taking the time to count the ways shrinkflation is (fractionally) eroding quality of life would take an age.
Because that would fit a lot of people's perception of how food is going: you get less, but what you do get is worse for you.
For example, vegtable oil instead of olive oil, fructose corn syrup instead of honey or sugar.
Beyond that chainging composition to reduce amount of expensive ingredients. Think Pesto Genovese which is originally Parmesan, Basil, pine nuts, etc. Instead of only pine nuts, you now include other nuts for texture and only add a smaller amount for flavour (and worse add flavoring so customers don't notice too quickly).
Also in big letters "OLIVE OIL" with barely legible "mixed with 90% sunflower seed, canola and other oils"
I am reading the container it says
Bac'n Pieces BACON FLAVORED BITS Great Bacon Flavor! artificially flavored
There's no crab in Krab sticks.
There's no cream in Krispy Kreme.
There's no vanilla in Nilla Wafers.
There's no mayonnaise in Just Mayo.
There's no lemon in Country Time Lemonade mix.
There are no truffles in most truffle oil.
There's no Wasabia japonica in most of wasabi.
Corn syrup is one of the only plant-derived industrial-scale sweeteners that isn't substantially fructose. HFCS is made by adding fructose to it so it can be used as a substitute for high-fructose sweeteners like sugar, honey, fruit juice, maple syrup, etc.
If its labeled as olive oil it has to be just oil from olives. The "extra virgin" and related labels don't carry any real weight here in the US though. I do wish we'd enforce labeling standards on stuff like EVOO, maybe also require actual country of origin for that particular bottle instead of allowing them to list it may come from practically every olive oil producing country.
Please name and shame the product, and report it to the USDA.
Once again, got any actual examples of this supposedly incredibly common thing?
Man they now make almost all olive oil from crude oil! Look, I've got a bottle here, says 100% PURE EXTRA ULTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL* and then you look at the fine print on this bottle and it says "LOL ACTUALLY 100% USED MOTOR OIL GOTCHA!!" This is how all the bottles at every supermarket in my unspecified city is like!
To be honest though, I've never come across this. Apparently its sold at HEB.
Its also kind of crazy it took this many replies for someone to actually link a real product they're talking about.
Either way, I still feel like this isn't breaking my standard. Its pretty obvious from the packaging what it is. "I've never encountered a bottle of oil in the US suggesting its olive oil when its really a blend". Its not hiding its a blend at all. Its on the face of the bottle, announcing its a blend is in an even bigger font than "OLIVE OIL". The person I replied to said the fact it was a blend was hardly legible. It was immediately obvious to me this was a blend.
(The key thing to remember is that sugar is bad for you; it's not that HFCS is good, but rather that cane sugar is just as harmful.)
Two fun additional notes:
* There's a video somewhere showing how cane sugar breaks down into fructose and glucose in bottled sodas anyways, and
* Perhaps unsurprisingly, taste testers can't reliably distinguish between HFCS and cane sugar formula Coke.
Yes, sugar breaks down to the same fructose and glucose proportion.
That takes months. Even longer in concentrated syrup form. Even longer in the one of two components that bottlers get to make the syrup.
A freshly bottled coke in a glass bottle still has the undivided sucrose and that is why it tastes more crisp. After a while, it separates and it doesn’t taste any better because it physically isn’t different.
A freshly bottled HFCS coke still tastes fresh in all other respects, but is essentially stale on day one as far as the sweetener goes.
But by far the best is a properly calibrated soda machine with fresh syrup— but it’s only really fresh if it is sucrose. Otherwise it’s basically stale before you even make it.
The half-life of sucrose in coke under good storage conditions is ~2 weeks[0]. Modestly higher temperatures, such as during transport, reduces that to hours. The internet suggests that that coke is typically consumed 4-12 weeks after manufacturing, depending on the supply chain. Even in the most optimistic scenario, no more than 25% of the sucrose remains when you drink it. Realistically, it will round to 0%. Almost no one has drank a coke that still had sucrose in it.
The process is slower than enzymatic catalysis in the body (seconds to minutes) but still quite fast.
[0] I used an LLM to run the math but the result passes a cursory eyeball test.
The half-life of sucrose is greatly reduced by acidity and to a lesser extent temperature. It is stable for centuries in a neutral pH when kept cool but that describes almost nothing we do with sugar in foods.
You can get the US formula coke with cane sugar during Passover in markets with a high Jewish population. Taste it, it'll be practically the same as HFCS US Coke and not like Mexican Coke. Because, it has the same amount of salt as the US variety.
We have shaped our food culture in a way to maximize short term profit at the expense of making everyone fat and disabled longer term.
That sounds pretty major. You can be not in the slightest bit obese and the blood sugar spikes will still be bad for your brain, your insulin regulation, etc as far as I understand it.
Sucrose is 50% fructose.
HFCS is ~42-55% fructose. Its "high fructose" compared to just straight corn syrup, which is 0% fructose (practically pure glucose).
I pointed it out because its often used instead of sugar for cost reasons.
So in theory an extremely fresh mexican coke might be different, but in practice you're getting the same thing.
Excessive consumption of fructose leads to fatty liver and is just generally bad for you.
And that's absolutely true. I think it's easy to hate (more) on HFCS because it literally says "high fructose" in it, and thus easy to come to that conclusion.
When corn starch is processed, the produced syrup is nearly 100% glucose. Because fructose tastes sweeter, lots of corn syrup is further processed, converting much of the glucose into fructose, hence the name high fructose corn syrup.
It's conceivable that if they've removed better quality ingredients, calories per gram of weight could go up.
That's obviously hard to measure because you can't do a blind taste test of a 20 year ago candy bar and one today, and people's tastes change as they get older. But worse ingredients making a worse flavor is possible too
The amount of time required to prepare incrementally larger batches increases at a sub-linear rate. The bigger your batch, the more food you get per unit of wall clock time. I try to prepare no less than 3 lbs of dry beans or 2 lbs of beef at a time. Anything less does actually feel like I'm wasting my energy.
The thing I see stopping most people in poverty is lack of access to a kitchen. No oven, no stove, no pantry, etc... A hot plate and a microwave if they are lucky. Also the usual health issues that come from deep poverty like executive dysfunction, depression, and other chronic illnesses.
Why should this be the case in principle though? Do economies of scale not apply to food preparation?
The homeowner does not charge themselves rent for their own kitchen, nor for their time.
Does it make economic sense? Yes, when you know that there is a frozen potato cartel: https://www.potatopro.com/news/2024/alleged-potato-cartel-ac...
I was far more likely to cook from scratch when I was poor than when I was not. And honestly, the food was healthier too. Basic life skills.
Nobody says "if you want a really good office chair you have to build it yourself". Same for shoes, cars, bikes, a million things. You can do that, make your own bike for example, but to get up to par you need to spend vastly more time and money, it's basically using more resources to be quirky or make an experiment etc.
IMO the default expectation, demand, the thing we should organise to achieve, should be that what's available, what the market competes over, is good and gets better, regardless of the market. Not that it gets worse because the buyers get fleeced. Doubly so not food.
> if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food?
Nope, doesn't work.
> There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.
You could say this about anything, you can either have cheap, good, and, say, extremely light-weight office-chars: pick two. That's absolutely orthogonal to what I said, and still applies to making your own vs. buying one that was made a lot cheaper be economics of scale. That trade-off applies in either case, so your comment is a complete no-op.
Why are so many things cheaper and get ever cheaper, while things like food, housing, education, medicine don't? Why does productivity rise so much faster than wages? Because there are no adults you can even discuss this with without their uneasiness forcing them to blurt out something, anything. Because people in golden cages can't even sit with what is. That's a provocative claim, an invitation for me to be proven wrong, but at least it actually relates to proceeding and surrounding comments and isn't just something out of a farmer's calendar.
That price depends a lot on where you live and shop.
Affluent urban professionals, of which there are many on HN, may have their perception of the world influenced by living in a bubble of people that eat out several times a week. Until I saw the BLS data, I assumed more people eat out than actually do because almost everyone I know falls into this category. But having been poor once, I definitively know you can eat cheaply and well by cooking at home.
I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper.
Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.
One big hit for me was having to create an entirely new set of recipes when I cut out meat from my diet. It got really hard because plant protein is way different from animal protein. The processed vegetarian stuff is insanely expensive too.
Modding those recipes to replace the dependency on heavily-processed ingredients with the fresh, less-processed comparables readily available today often produces good results, though it does take more time.
[1] - https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&...
It takes very little time to prepare and cook most simple meals - if you want to dress it and garnish it and execute a 1000 step recipe, that is of course on you. For example, you can have a steak and potato (loaded with cheese and sour cream) as good as anything you get in a restaurant in under ten minutes. It is rarely faster to go out to eat. That is of course taking as a given that people really are working more hours, which I am very skeptical of and which BLS data does not support.
I am sympathetic to people's arguments about cost and free time generally, but I think "cooking your own food" is mostly a victim of the increasingly sky-high value people place on convenience vs doing almost anything for themselves that constitutes "work" in their minds. It is definitely not true that money is the issue, as other commenters already mentioned.
Not true on average. The average American spends 4-5 hours a day on personal screen time.
And those who complain about not having time to cook I'd bet dollars to donuts are pulling that average up, if my personal lived experience is anything to go by.
There is a case here in terms of two income households being the norm these days, but that's really about it. The average person today lives a life of far more comfort and convenience than even in the 90's.
The idea is basically that it's "just the way it is" that the food we can buy in supermarkets, that is made in factories, that GIGANTIC amounts of real estate and logistics and energy are devoted to, that is made cheaper than it would be otherwise (and that is true even if it was awesome quality and mega healthy -- it would be more expensive, but less expensive than doing it yourself, economics of scale etc.) sucks, is unhealthy, you "shouldn't eat that".
Just buy some veggies and do it yourself. It's not so hard to plant some tomatoes, either! Nevermind people in private jets doing airshows... I just can't with how lazy my friends are. It would take them 30 minutes max.
It's not that you're wrong, of course. Both "sides" matter, and you always should mostly focus on what you control. But at the same time, it's better to punch up than kick down or sideways.
Everyone likes to say Homer Simpson lived like a king. He had a car that was so bad it would be illegal to sell new today, no cell phone, no netflix, no Uber eats, clothes were so expensive it was worth the SAHM fix them, pizza or Chinese takeaway were a luxury, not a lot of furniture.
People today eat so well that broke 30 year olds will order haute cuisine and say it's basically the same price as home cooking (OK it's roughly as big a rip off as maccas in Australia but still ... home cooking can be dirt cheap).
> From pretty much day one, the size of a @McDonalds beef patty has been 10:1 (10 patties per pound of beef). It still follows this standard today. Same size.
> There are no fillers, preservatives, organs, bones, or anything like that, just 100% pure USDA beef. The box doesn’t even need an ingredient label; it simply states 100% Beef.whenever i see this i drives me away, i'd rather buy from a business that drew stick figure ads by hand. funniest thing i saw was an ai food ad and someone asked if the ai makes the food as well. the staff were actually miffed lol.
People have complained my stick figures look "unprofessional".
Hmm. I think it's just as easy to find products that haven't gotten worse or more expensive as it is to find ones that have. For every mars bar, there's a video game.
Got a fairly expensive LG OLED and after 5 years it's developing clusters of dead pixels down one edge. And even if the hardware doesn't fail/degrade, the software is often enshittified (ads pushed to smart TVs)
Now with everything digital only, you don't even own your games, your ability to play it is at the whims of mega-corporations. You can't resell it to recoup money, or lend it to a friend. Most games start on day 1 as essentially a beta, with tons of huge updates required to get them in a decent state, loot boxes, microtransactions, live service games taking over the entire market share, RAMmagedden driving up console prices post-launch, etc etc etc etc.
They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.
As I said to another commenter, that applies to many of the games I buy today. OK, not quite all since I do buy some titles digitally, but that is my choice.
> They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.
And are much better in terms of accessibility, quality-of-life in general, scope, etc.
A lot of people aren't enjoying modern games (with modern monetization)
20 years ago you bought a disk and the entire game was on there. 10 years ago you bought a disk and you have a massive day 1 patch to get the rest of the game. Today you buy a physical box with no actual disk in it, only a download code!
I'm exaggerating a little bit about today's situation but not by much...
If I pay $10 for a game and play it for 400hrs and pay $40 for another game and only play it for 50hrs, is one necessarily worse or better than the other by that metric? For example, I've played Outer Wilds significantly less than many other games that I've enjoyed far less, but I would still rank Outer Wilds as one of my all-time top favorite games. However that's very subjective to my experience. Others would disagree.
The point is, video games is a very bad point of comparison here and very obviously not the kind of product the OP is referring to.
But putting that aside, the ratio isn't 1:1. I'd expect the ratio to be at least 20:1 - you can name at most 1 thing that got better/cheaper for every 20 things that got worse/more expensive.
That's the thing, the style of game release of the 90s is all but dead. Sure you can still find indy studios releasing in a 90s style, but you can't find the big players doing that. Now a lot of the big name games have switched to either a freemium model or a pay to play model.
You don't simply buy a game like Overwatch, you have to get a battle pass to keep playing. And you don't ultimately own overwatch, once blizzard is done with it, the game is over and you can no longer play it. Then there's the fact that to be competitive, these games often sell items and loot boxes. If you want to not always die, you end up needing to buy these perks.
That is a worst experience designed to milk money out of players as much as possible, more than what you'd be paying adjusted for inflation.
The entire genre of FPS is like this now. Unless you play the old games, you basically cannot get the old experience of setting up a server, maybe letting it be open to the public, and just playing a game with friends. Instead is a bunch of random dumb shit that you have to deal with.
From my point of view, 2006-2012 was a nadir of PC gaming. A string of unoriginal games or bad console ports.
I'm always happy to keep my mind open to alternate points of view, but I'd really struggle to name the big and cheap hits of that era.
That era in gaming had many releases that are still considered among the best games of all time, that pioneered trends that reshaped the whole industry. Almost every year had at least a couple such titles.
2004 GTA San Andreas, Half-Life 2
2005 God of War, Need For Speed: Most Wanted
2006: TES: Oblivion, Gears of War, Okami
2007: Call of Duty 4, Portal, Bioshock
2008: Dead Space, Left 4 Dead
2009: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2
2010: Read Dead Redemption, Bayonetta, Starcraft 2
2011: Skyrim, Portal 2, Dark Souls
2012: XCOM, Guild Wars 2, Diablo 3, Far Cry 3
2013: GTA V, The Last of Us, DOTA 2
Red Dead Redemption still hasn't even come to PC yet, it's due out this year!
Okay, so I was the one who narrowed it to talking about PC games, but if we look at console gaming then it has got consistently cheaper.
Sonic & Knuckles cost around $60 in 1994 money, that's about $130 in today's money.
Games have got vastly cheaper, for decades they were consistently around $60 and it's only recently they've crept up.
But I'm not here to argue about 2006. I'm making a point that contemporary games are worse. I don't think it's even possible to make such a list for recent years. We get 1, at most 2 good games per year - and most of them are straight sequels with little to no innovation over their pre-pandemic predecessors. And not just on PC - across all platforms. Seriously, try to write down this list for the last 5 years and tell me it's not drastically worse than my list - and my list is of the allegedly worst period for gaming!
As for the prices. Most games were $50 until 2005 or so. A lot of PSX titles were $40. Then there's the trend of dicing up content into $10-20 DLCs in increasing quantities, meaning you're getting less of a game per purchace if you only buy the base version. A different kind of shrinkflation.
Get some fresher data mr LLM.
You used to get a lot of stuff in a game box that wasn't just the game though. Manuals were often very detailed, arguably works of art in their own right. Also the cost of producing and shipping games is way lower online than it was for physical copies. Companies all used to have to develop their own engines and tooling to build games, that cost is mostly just gone with Unity and Unreal now.
Last and definitely not least, there's way more competition in the gaming industry now, and that tends to drive prices down.
I can't fathom why you'd pick video games as your example ffs.
That describes at least 90% of the games I play today.
I should have gone with any electrical item, tbh; that would probably have flown here without any dissent. But video games that are nowadays almost always one or two orders of magnitude 'better value' while being approximately half the price they were back in the nineties are still a legitimate example, I think.
While this is _true_, it's hardly a good-faith interpretation. The original Mario Bros was around $40 on release. Mostly sold as a bundle with the NES itself around $100.
That's $350 in today's money. Oddly around the same as the switch 1 on release ($299) + BOTW ($60)
Compare the "value" of NES + Mario Bros with Switch 1 + Breath of the Wild.
Yes Nintendo can take one of those away from you, that's despicable, but the "product" has shrunk in no way.
I even prefer the original CS over most of today's FPS games.
True! But for me Myst was one of those super-hyped-up titles that failed to live up to its reputation. And I'm not a youngun, I started on NES/SNES! I'm not convinced GP isn't relying more on nostalgia than a real sampling of current titles.
I did stop gaming ~15 years ago, but I have tried to find good games for my (now teenage) kids, so I have tried to research new games even if I haven't played them myself. I haven't found anything on the level of Myst/Riven/Exile.
You know what else they don't make anymore? Good split/screen coop games, like Splinter Cell. Everything is online multiplayer, but no more being able to sit on a couch and play together (other than Nintendo games, racing games). Same for good ol' LAN games. And sure, it's convenient to just game from home, but there's nothing like everyone lugging their boxes over to your place and setting them up on the dining room table for a pizza-fueled all nighter :)
The economics of software (including video games) are entirely different than candy bars or burgers as the marginal cost of each "unit" is effectively zero.
That's a better example, though the "continually better, faster & cheaper" days for computers (and consumer electronics broadly) have recently been heavily disrupted by the current AI rush. Guess we'll find out how temporary or permanent this is.
What's it like to live in a world where competent AAA studios are still plentiful, and the legacy studios successfully passed down knowledge and ethos to new hires, so as to avoid becoming skinsuit versions of their past selves?
How is it, living in a world where several AAA blockbuster games are still being released annually, with none of them being remakes of decade-plus-old titles?
Is there any wisdom in how your reality's AAA video game industry kept the stride they built up to in the 2000s, into the 2010s, that you could share with us, so we can hopefully rebuild the smoldering crater of a AAA video game industry we have in our reality?
A world that contains Breath of the Wild, Blue Prince, Balatro, Mario Kart World, (you get the point—there are lots of good games).
Is “the AAA video game industry” just Nintendo, to you?
> a decade and a half ago?
For me personally, the AAA game industry is entirely Nintendo, yes. Half the games I mentioned are cross-platform, though; I know they're not 'AAA', but I don't think this discussion needs to be limited purely to AAAs. And, as I mentioned, there are plenty more games that I could have included.
There's nothing wrong with being a fan of one company, but pretending that going from a world where there were many high-quality AAA video games released each year from many different studios to what we have today, just because Nintendo is doing alright and you like Nintendo—when the topic at hand is specifically “the video games industry” as a whole—is simply asinine.
AAA studios were once the force driving technology and game design forward, regularly starting fresh new IPs that would go on to become cherished by fans. That simply does not happen anymore. What was the last fresh new Nintendo IP that went on to become a beloved recurring success—Splatoon (eleven years ago)?
Nintendo deserves plenty of credit for actively working against stagnation more than literally everyone else, but they are completely peerless in this regard. Everyone else ended up falling into a death spiral of churning out remakes and/or being absorbed into Microsoft and then stagnating until death. There is no longer a vibrant industry full of technical innovation and a genuine eye toward craftsmanship, quality, and generally making new fun things to play.
The indie game scene picked up some of the slack on the innovation front, to great success, yet almost none of the successful indie studios (off the top of my head, Facepunch is the only exception I can think of) have transmuted said success into building a studio with a culture focused on exploring the frontier of the medium. Hell, half of the big indie successes these days make their millions in Early Access, predicated upon the implied promise that their Early Access success will permit them to substantially build out the game beyond their Early Access offering, only to completely and utterly fail to do so in the end.
Anyone who thinks the video games industry is in a good place in 2026 is completely delusional and/or simply ignoring relatively recent history and pretending that things have always been as dire as they are today.
Also Mario Kart World was eighty bucks at launch dude (I had to look it up to be sure, but, yeah—I totally paid eighty US dollars for that game), and it's still selling for eighty bucks today, so, your entire position in this discussion is completely invalid on its face.
Such a professional industry completely cratering in on itself (for myriad reasons) is a bad thing.
Indie vs. AAA doesn't have to be a zero-sum game—the rise of the indie does not necessarily have to correspond with the fall of AAA.
Semantics aside, the point is, at one point in time, it was very good and healthy for the medium to have a vibrant AAA (and AA) video games industry. You're generally not going to see indies pushing the technical frontier forward, practically by definition. Things were never perfect, but they were better than they are today. Nowadays, it's basically impossible for someone to get a salaried position making video games.
Which is a bummer, because I grew up thinking that would be definitely where I was going to end up in terms of my career—having some salaried position somewhere, making games with people with different skillsets and areas of expertise than my own, learning from my seniors, having a sense of comradery with the people I worked with, becoming a better game developer. That ship has sadly sailed (or sunk)—it doesn't seem likely that we will have an industry like that again anytime soon.
I suspect shrinkflation has a lot to do with inflation. Companies degrade the quality of their products to preserve their margins which are being eaten up by inflation.
But what I cannot stand is cutting quality of products and services. It happens in all sorts of ways. Thickeners and substitutions but also when a supermarket wastes your time asking you to scan N of the same SKU at rather than providing a qty button and even the staff can't help. But on the old school checkouts they do have a quantity field. It's different when they know their time will be wasted you see. And then there is the endless market segmentation from coupons, bundles, surveillance pricing and all sorts of mechanisms designed to muddy price signals and discriminate to shake down every customer to their limit.
How much of this recorded in consumer inflation I wonder? So much effort is put into scheming rather than innovation which seems highly inefficient if you think about productivity. Isn't late stage capitalism great.
From 20+ episode seasons every year to maybe 8-10 episodes every 2-3 years.
Yeah, budgets/production values are higher. But characters and storytelling were often better in those old shows (Star Trek TNG/DS9, Lost, 24, Breaking Bad) where they could make those longer seasons every year for 5 or more years in a row. Simply far more screen time for character development.
Why? Because I don’t use it as a TV AND a set top box. I use it just as a TV that is connected to an AppleTV
And before when I was using the inbuilt smart TV, I had disabled various android services related to ads on my Sony TV, and run pi-hole that blocks ads.
Far better than anything I ran in the 90's or even 00's.
2025 model of the latest and greatest LG OLED. TV not connected to Internet, because who on HN would actually do that?
Even with your chosen set top box it's cheaper than ever before. It's on you if you choose to use the built-in Internet players. Those effectively come for free and you get what you pay for in that regard. No different than the 90's or 00's buying a cable box, VCR, or DVD player. Cheaper actually, since a Shield or Apple TV replaces all those devices into one quite relatively affordable device.
TVs overall are far better quality in terms of user experience. And I'm someone who has always had an overkill home theatre setup I spend far too much money on and upgrade far too often. It's only gotten better performance for dollar my entire life.
I suppose if you enjoy channel flipping it might be worse? But that's not something I really do much of, so hard to comment there.
Pretty sad state of things when simple pleasures like beer or chocolate are hit so hard by enshittification.
You’d think competitive brands could launch to bring joy but everyone is so cash strapped that those brands lose since the mega corps price cheaper even if it’s worse/shrinkflated. Or they just get bought and rolled into the oligopoly!
Isn't capitalism great? The common pattern with everything seems to be large companies degrading size, quality, and features of products in user-hostile ways.
IMHO, we need pretty strict regulation specifying standard product sizes and minimum quality. It would kill shrinkflation and also make alternatives more comparable.
On a related note: I recently listened to this (very good) podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hidden-supply-chai..., https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-25/the-hidde...) that stated pretty bluntly that food in the US is also more expensive and lower quality than food in Europe.
I was just thinking about bread in the US specifically. When I go to the grocery store here the bread is relatively expensive, and the vast majority of it is full of chemical additives. It subjectively tastes like fake crap. It's mass produced in a factory and shipped across the country, and for all that it's not even cheap to buy.
There are one or two specialty bakeries in my city but they are far apart, and a bit expensive, though still so much better than what is available at the chain groceries. I'm sure there are lots of places in the country that don't have those local options at all. Feels like the basic unadulterated loaf of bread has in the US become more of a luxury item than a cheap staple.
In my limited European experience (Italy and France mostly), there were numerous small bakeries in every single neighborhood I visited. I could easily take a short walk and grab a baguette or loaf for 1-2 euro, far cheaper than in the US. The bread was delicious and fresh, locally made, free of all the questionable additives.
Then repeat that for other things like cheese, berries, cured meat... each available in Europe with so much less additive or alteration, so much less mass production, cheaper and more plentiful. My travel diet was excellent and felt both healthier and cheaper.
I'm not sure what lead to this cultural difference. Maybe centralization, car culture, difference in regulation, or something else entirely. But the end result is a bit depressing.
When I was traveling in Europe, I stopped in stores to compare the foods and prices. I looked at the food labels, and the food there had just as many chemicals as the similarly priced items in the U.S. The expensive foods had fewer adulterants...but that's the same way expensive food in the U.S.
TLDR: expensive food is still decent everywhere. Cheap food is crap everywhere.
Like, internet speeds are far faster than they used to be, cheap phones are much better than expensive phones were a decade ago, TVs used to be an expensive status symbol 15 years ago — and look at them now.
Video games basically didn't index with inflation for years, and it's easy to pick up great older games at cheap prices on sale.
YouTube is free and an incredible resource for learning, entertainment, and brainrot.
Google Maps provides free GPS services, which are incredibly valuable. You even have FreeVee-style streaming services that don't require a subscription.
Like, if you buy garbage in a wrapper you should expect garbage. No one owes you a candy bar that never changes weight. The idea you would want to regulate that level of “what can people trade with each other” is absurd.
You don't have a choice most of the time. You get to pick from the options the manufactures provide. And it's not like the average consumer has infinite time to sort through all the options on every item, as well as misleading manufacturer BS (like shrinkflation).
> The non-chain restaurants in my area are significantly better than 30 years ago. So are the breweries. Dive bars have gotten more sparse but the ones still around are better than ever. Food trucks are everywhere and good. Foods more expensive but you can still get a good restaurant cooked meal at 1/2 an hour’s minimum wage.
Sure, if you're in a fancy urban area you may have lots of options (the podcast cited New York as an example), but that's not true everywhere. It cited this hits hardest in rural areas.
Then there's the situation where you have 5 different options, but they all suck the same way because manufacturers are following the same incentives to screw their customers.
> No one owes you a candy bar that never changes weight. The idea you would want to regulate that level of “what can people trade with each other” is absurd.
I think I am owed a market structure that lets me make decisions with a reasonable amount of effort. Fixing the candy bar weight (for instance) means I can compare on price easily.
And regulating “what can people trade with each other” is not absurd, it happens all the time.
I ordered a smash burger recently at a local outfit for the price of a big Mac. It was also a double but it was about twice the size of a big Mac and juicy and delicious, not that dry McDonald's processed crap.
I only eat McDonald's if there's really nothing else. Same with the other chains.
I'd love to know where I can find a "good restaurant cooked meal" for US$3.63[0].
Would you share even one location where that's possible? I'd eat every single meal there myself!
Let's try that in Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma or one of the 17 other states with a $7.25 minimum wage and see how we do?