"We didn't only shrink the size, we also lowered the quality of ingredients to maximize profits!"

I’m sure your customers have been demanding smaller bars that cost more.

Well, their customers have kept on buying their products so clearly they don't care too much.

Translation:

we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand

People don't by Mars because it's a top-tier, gucci product.

alongside considering wider external factors such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa

And if we stayed the same size, it'd be really expensive, because among other things the global climate no longer supports chocolate production.

TBF none of it is a lie. That's as close as corporate-speak comes to "yup we did that".

I would also be surprised if the cost of production, now using cheaper ingredients and far more automation, hadn't also decreased.

In 1991 those were closer to 30 cents.

That's the official inflation numbers, which are lies. It's an open secret that in the 90s there was a political movement among the owners to artificially lower reported inflation (see: Boskin Commission for example) because it would boost the economy (on paper) while letting them absorb the gains.

Underreporting by 1-2% a year doesn't seem like much until you do it for several decades. Looking at actual inflation instead of the reported lie, that mars bar is closer to $2 today. Shrinkflation had to happen to keep the bigger con going. Most businesses will, of course, cheat the margins at every instance.

TLDR; shrinkflation is a symptom, not the disease

We've had the technology to stop this since 1791. Arguments about maturity could be made that put an industrial version as late as 1917.

That's still over a century ago.

I saw a Curly Wurly in a shop the other day, and they're now a pale imitation of what they were.

Damn those are some grippers

You were just smaller then.

It's a weird thing to think about, but in a ship-of-Theseus sort of way a lot of the products we grew up with don't really exist anymore. By that I mean, if it's half the size and made of different ingredients then the Mars Bar as it was introduced has effectively been discontinued. There's just some other, crappier knock-off being sold under the same name now.

That's almost the worst part. Not only is the food ultra-processed now, but it's all engineered to extract every fraction of a penny in margins.
If this goes on, I might as well just inject palm oil straight to my veins.

WRONG. It'll be just the one Mar.

I can eat many, but they never completely fill the void inside.

I'd sign for enshittification being the worst thing that happens this century. Considering there are years 73 ahead of us in the century, it might only be the precursor of what will actually be the word of the century.

And using it to describe everything is the enshitification of the word enshitification

If its the word of the millenium Im very curious where it goes...

Food products, probably. In clothes or cars, for example, you can't just make things smaller. With clothes, it seems more like skimpflation - some items definitely had thinner-feeling fabric right after COVID, although it got better again. With cars, they just raise the price, so that's inflation.

If costs go up you have to do one of the three. You're probably not getting angry phone calls because your Mars bar went down in size by 1g, but might if it's more expensive or tastes like shit, so that's the advantage there.

Mars bars are sold in the US under the name Milky Way. Not to be confused with what's globally known as Milky Way, which is called 3 Musketeers in the US.

No mars bars at all?

For the same price it is not.