I assume you mean the quality is quietly reduced without notifying the consumer? I’ve heard Cheapflation and Skimpflation.
“Cheapflation” sounds exactly like what I was thinking of. https://www.brusselstimes.com/1021212/not-so-fishy-fish-sticks-what-is-cheapflation-and-what-to-pay-attention-to
In Albert Heijn’s fish sticks, the fish content dropped from 75% to 55%.
Eeewwww
Enshittification
That’s a much broader term.
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”.
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.
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.
“Great new taste”
Or
“New and improved”
“Hey boss, we took the fish out of our fish sticks like you asked.”
“Great job, Johnson. Slap a “Great new taste” sticker on it and call it a day.”
The reason I ask, is I noticed that Naked brand Strawberry Banana drinks now taste like regular juice, instead of having a thick smoothie taste. They used to advertise that each small bottle contained 22 strawberries, also listing the primary ingredient as strawberry puree. They now say each bottle is 6 and 3/4 strawberries, with the primary ingredient being apple juice. Strawberry puree is now listed as the 3rd ingredient.
Is there a term for when a manufacturer changes ingredients so drastically that it just ruins the original product? I’ve heard “enshitification” before, but always associated that with tech.
In before someone says Naked is all sugar and isn’t worth drinking in the first place.
Its still referred to as shrinkflation as i have seen it used. Putting filler material is just hiding the shrinkage, but the motivators and the result is the same
Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.
Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of
Shrinkflation is smaller quantities
Yes
and/or higher prices.
No. That’s just normal inflation.
Right, by design. But when your are talking about the phenomenon casually, because the purpose and result is the same, shrinkflation seems to suffice. Are you asking for the name of the phenomena in the context of a detailed study? For that i am not sure it has a term it’s own.
I think it’s different enough from shrinkflation that it needs its own name. My gripe specifically was with Naked Juice, where if it was just being sold in a smaller bottle, I would buy more. But the recipe has actually changed to a point where I don’t want to drink it at all now, because it’s just not the same.
From an article linked above, my emphasis added, this is different because consumers are less able to protect themselves from it by being informed:
“We have long observed shrinkflation and bad value for money maxi packs,” Laura Clays, spokesperson for consumer protection organisation Test Achats, told The Brussels Times. “However, these tactics were mainly dubious from a financial point of view. This is still unacceptable, but consumers were able to protect themselves by keeping an eye on the price per unit.”
She stressed that in the case of “cheapflation”, the consumer is left more or less powerless. “This tactic is really about what people are ingesting, which is even more sneaky. While this will likely not have major health effects, eating less fishy fish sticks is definitely not a healthier meal option, so that’s not ideal.”
Strictly speaking this is a subset of what the food industry calls reformulation. They’ll also reformulate a product for other reasons (eg to reduce sugar/fat/salt or add a vitamin so they can make a health claim, tweak the flavour if it isn’t performing well, etc) but reducing materials and manufacturing costs is a big part of it. Maybe we can coin the term “deformulation”.
I like that name. Deformulation definitely implies that the change was not made for the benefit of the consumer.
I’d argue that this qualifies as enshittification.
General enshittification, which is a consequence of declining Capitalism and the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall.
To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…
- 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.
Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.
Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.
Correct, because the “traditional” definition you outlined with the 3 points is ultimately the same process with the same mechanics and same vectors of force.
the same process
It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.
Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.
Oh… you mean cheaper as in shittier not less expensive.
I don’t know of a name for it in general, but Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification.
Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality.
Enshitification is what I thought at first, but I’ve only seen that for tech. The wiki starts with “a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality”, so it didn’t seem quite right.
Haha I originally planned on writing “shittier” in the title, but then read it as “shit tier” and backed it out.
Not sure if it need a specific term for that but watered-down seems to be the one being used for ages.
Yeah. I was having trouble finding exactly what I was looking for by googling “Naked Juice watered-down”. I did find something else that suggested specifically what I was seeing with Naked Juice described as Applejuiceification. But that doesn’t seem as versatile to describe other food products.
That’s just regular deflation.
“shrinkflation” was a term which tried top capture the size instead of price. But if you want to stay within the price semantics, then your good old deflation, stagflation, inflation will do just fine.
I think when the op said “cheaper” they meant the quality of the product is lowered, not that the price is lowered (I also thought this is what they meant at first and was very confused)
Yeah you’re right. I stuck to the old askreddit rule of not adding clarifying text and put it in my comment instead. That kind of gets buried though. My bad.
