Asklemmy

43859 readers

1479 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Is there a term similar to "shrinkflation" when food is made cheaper instead of smaller? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 months ago by jballs@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's what I originally thought, but I've only seen that term for tech stuff. Wikipedia describes it as "a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality".

[–] theparadox@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I've see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.

Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

A word that includes the word "shit" in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.

Edit: As per Wikipedia's Shrinkflation Entry:

Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.

I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per "smoothie" is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original "smoothie" formula per bottle.

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Well said. Skimpflation describes exactly what I'm talking about. It's subtle, because they're banking on the fact that people won't notice immediately and then will gradually accept the new recipe. Probably the same reason that people remember Cadbury Cream Eggs being better when they were kids - and a million other tiny things.