What's with all the tiny soda cans? And other grocery store mysteries, solved.

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's a behind the scenes industry that helps big brands decide questions like: How big should a bag of chips be? What's the right size for a bottle of shampoo? And yes, also: When should a company do a little shrinkflation?

From Cookie Monster to President Biden, everybody is complaining about shrinkflation these days. But when we asked the packaging and pricing experts, they told us that shrinkflation is just one move in a much larger, much weirder 4-D chess game.

The name of that game is "price pack architecture." This is the idea that you shouldn't just sell your product in one or two sizes. You should sell your product in a whole range of different sizes, at a whole range of different price points. Over the past 15 years, price pack architecture has completely changed how products are marketed and sold in the United States.

Today, we are going on a shopping cart ride-along with one of those price pack architects. She's going to pull back the curtain and show us why some products are getting larger while others are getting smaller, and tell us about the adorable little soda can that started it all.

By the end of the episode, you'll never look at a grocery store the same way again.

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Transcript

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0:20.5	You know Amanda, I feel like everybody these days is talking about the same thing that thing being shrinkflation
0:26.2	Ah Yes, shrinkflation that of course is the idea that companies maybe are trying to trick customers by making the packages of
0:34.1	their products smaller but charging the same price. And you know who apparently
0:37.3	really hates shrinklation? Who? Cookie monster? Cookie monster. Yeah he had this
0:42.3	tweet earlier this year he He was like me hate
0:44.8	shrinkflation, me cookies are getting smaller. Oh Jeff I hope he didn't spend too much
0:50.2	time on that imitation. So another person who has been talking about
0:54.8	shrinklation maybe a little less famous than Cookie Monster? Some companies are
0:58.9	trying to pull a fast one by shrinking the products little by little and hoping you won't notice.
1:04.4	Give me a break.
1:05.4	Give me a break.
1:06.4	Who's the president around here?
1:07.8	Let's call that guy.
1:08.8	Yeah, everyone loves to complain about shrinkflation.
1:11.8	There's this poll last year year like 80% of Americans
1:14.6	have noticed shrinkflation and they are mad about it. Which kind of makes you
1:19.0	wonder like if shrinkflation makes people so, why would companies still do it?
	...

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