2020s: Shrinkflation
July 3, 2022
By AHNZ
If AHNZ wrote about economics there’d be more than monetary inflation. But how about food inflation?
Is our bread or even our biscuits anything near as high quality as our great grandparents? Is our flour, our meat, our water, our chocolate, our milk anything like what a Colonial would have had? Full of palm oil, hormones, corn syrup, salts, and government compounds.
Your shoes are junk, especially if you buy them from Kmart or the Warehouse. Colonial shoes were so good they repaired them if they broke. Even in my lifetime I can remember when Kmart was more than the big $2.00 shop it is now. It used to be what Farmers is now and ‘Farmers’ used to be a safe brand name for a business but now it’s more of a liability!
Better postal system? Better teachers and schools? Better clothing? Better home appliances? We throw our Chinese junk away and buy another one. Old New Zealand furniture outlasts disposable MDF Warehouse junk many times over. Our media is crap, our governance is worse than ever, our musicians and artists are puffed up with the inflation of government funding. Our hospitals used to be state of the art. We used to have heavy industry and manufacture our own products in this country. We had our own chocolate factory and invented our own confectionery (Sparkles, Snifters, Jaffas,..) Even coal has become inflated as it is of less quality than when we used to produce it ourselves rather than import it.
“Some Kiwis told The Project that Griffin’s Toffee Pops have less toffee in them, Bluebird chip bags seem less full, Mother Earth muesli bars were shorter and thinner, and Pringles are smaller with fewer in the tube…New flavours of Tim Tams have nine in a pack rather than the usual 11, Cadbury creme eggs dropped a gram, and some yoghurt pottles have shrunk from 150 grams to 125g…shrinkflation is actually costing you even more than inflation.” – How shrinkflation is costing you more as inflation hits your back pocket, Newshub (April 2022)
That’s the truth about inflation in New Zealand. It has happened slowly enough that we didn’t notice it happening or else we would have spat it out on day 1 like a bad Tasmanian Pineapple Lump.
The concept of inflation applies to price. Shrinkflation is a form of inflation where apparent price is the same because the quantity of the good has been lowered. My interest here doesn’t have a name yet. Valuflation? The concept is that a given good or service is nominally the same yet the product and its component parts have been substituted for inferior ones. Another example are Beehive matches, an old Kiwi brand once made here but now imported budget junk that retains the nostalgic branding so that we’ll still buy them over identical junk in different packaging. This is also a big reason for the fall of Ernest Adams. Ref. 1920: Ernest Adams
As we entered the 2020s the naive r-selected population dominated by Millennials were ready to believe that money was a spook. A made-up thing rather than a store of value. Always ready to exploit the ignorant, the Labour 6.0 Government promptly collaborated with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to print off billions and nobody said a word to protest it. In doing so they simply taxed the value from those who held New Zealand dollars to fill the empty shells of their imaginary ‘electronic’ dollars. No productivity, no value, had increased here. The same amount of butter had simply been spread more thinly over the toast of the New Zealand economy.
“Before lockdown, Parliament approved up to $52 billion for the Government to use for its immediate Covid-19 response to try and keep the economy ticking. But, where is that money coming from?”
‘it’s safe…it’s low-risk…because it’s issued by the government.’
“We’re an investor like anyone else so we expect to be paid back when they mature.” – How the Government pays for its Covid-19 policies, TVNZ (2020)
The nearest thing to an outcry or reporting on this momentous decision was provided satirically and half-jokingly by TVNZ reporter Julian Lee. On the 7pm infomercial disguised as news called Seven Sharp the reporter, Mr Lee, was permitted to approach the edge of the RBNZ front steps in Wellington. From the footpath he interviewed Christian Hawkesby, one of the half-dozen or so Assistant Governors.
“Many believe that an economy that was closed can simply be opened and the massive bubble created by a decade of cheap credit will be re-inflated as easily as Adrian Orr prints electronic money….We are in for a shock.” – Damien Grant
“As at June 30, 26 people filled Tier 2 and 3 roles at the RBNZ. Within a few months, 10 of these people will be gone.” – The Reserve Bank confirms 10 of its 26 most senior staff are leaving,, Interest.co.nz (December 2021)
“It comes as annual food price inflation grew 6.8 per cent in the 12 months to May 2022 as the country grapples with a cost of living crisis.” – Major chicken supplier hikes prices 10%, Newstalk ZB (July 2022)
In these shonky conditions, Hawkesby admitted that diluting a national blood supply certainly used to be considered suicidal or at least unconventional. But now it’s normal because it’s being done by other ‘developed countries’. Lee’s skeptical tone was all that stood in the way of our going ahead with this madness and even that came after the fact. How many times do New Zealanders need to re-learn economics?
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