The Pringles tube got narrower, the stack got shorter, and the price stayed the same. This episode examines shrinkflation, the practice that boardrooms call package downsizing or price pack architecture. Companies fear raising a sticker price because shoppers treat a price as a kind of social contract, an idea economists call the invisible handshake. So they shrink the product instead, guided by Weber’s Law and the just noticeable difference, the threshold below which a change escapes conscious notice.

Sometimes the math fails in public. Toblerone widened the gaps between its triangles, Haagen-Dazs trimmed its pint, and a supermarket quietly cut the egg yolk in its mayonnaise. That last trick, called skimpflation, lowers quality while weight and price hold steady, and it may even hide inflation from the statisticians who track a basket of goods. The episode weighs the defense that shrinking is a rational answer to rising costs against the charge that it depends on keeping buyers in the dark.

• In 2016 Mondelez cut the UK Toblerone bar from 170 grams to 150 by widening the valleys between peaks while keeping the box the same length.
• Pringles in Australia and New Zealand fell from 165 grams to 134 after production moved from the United States to Malaysia, where the machines made a smaller chip and a shorter tube.
• Ben and Jerry’s mocked Haagen-Dazs in 2009 for shrinking pints to 14 ounces, yet in 2020 its owner Unilever cut European tubs from 500 milliliters to 465.
• Britain’s Office for National Statistics identified 206 products that shrank between 2015 and 2017, while the US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the effect on inflation at about 0.01 percent a year.
• Carrefour posted shelf warnings naming shrinking brands in 2023, Brazil requires a package notice for at least six months, and the best defense for shoppers is the unit price.