How should we design anti-shrinkflation laws?

We could look at historical laws that did exactly this.

Set standard sizes and only allow sales in those size on penalty of prosecution.

For an example from the uk, until a few years ago bread could only be sold in 400g or multiples thereof.

You couldn't sell most kinds of bread except in standard sizes, so shrinkflation couldn't occur.

There were some exceptions obviously and you could have bigger multiples (like the mythical 1600g loaf)

https://www.fob.uk.com/about-the-bread-industry/how-bread-is...

The standard approaches on how do this date back centuries.

Milk gets sold in standard pints (err... 568ml), beer in pints, flour in 1kg bags, etc.

I actually think these restrictions are a good thing, with permitted exceptions possible for some specific things

My feeling is that, so long as the weights and prices are transparently displayed, this should be a producer/consumer choice.

Maybe it matters to me that I want to be able to buy $5 worth of dishwasher detergent, whether that's enough for 12 loads of dishes or later is only enough for 9 loads, as long as that's transparently stated, I don't see the issue.

In some cases (like chips and sugared drinks), shrinkflation might be a net benefit to consumers overall.

In Canada (or maybe just Ontario?) we have price per unit weight. Like “$0.38 per 100 grams”

It’s a required part of a price label in grocery stores.

I suspect this exists elsewhere too. It works fine enough. I don’t see a need for anything further. It’s really simple and anyone who needs simpler probably won’t benefit from simpler anyways.

At most, mandate a new product id when the product materially changes. It's not great when the new size has the same bar code as the old one. Or when a computer product is updated with a different chipset and has the same model number. Or when a CD is remastered, but has the same label and liner.

If hot dog companies sell 10 hot dogs and bun companies sell 8 buns, and Coke sells 10 packs, but Pepsi sells 12 packs, I don't think that's nice for consumers, but I don't think government intervention is the right way to fix it.

This seems like a really odd thing to standardize OR legislate to me.

Maybe require cost per unit to be displayed under the price itself and let the "busy crowd" do the math if they care enough?

I don't think there is a problem to solve.

Shrinkflation is annoying - I'm sure many would prefer to pay more for the same product, but ultimately if you can afford it, you can just buy multiple packs to get the quantity you need.

As long as a company does not lie about product sizes on the packaging, it should be free to sell products in any quantity. Consumers that feel tricked will buy from another company.

It'd be fun to have a sparkline printed next to both the actual price, and the price-per-ounce (or whatever). Set it at like a year. Would make it really easy to see the price changes without having to memorize the price or price-per-ounce of a thousand different items.

I am on the road right now, I had a Burrito last night that was good and priced fairly, I ate 90% of it. I got indigestion. I wish I'd gotten 70% as big a burrito and paid 70% as much.

That's not fair to the restaurant though because their overheard includes order taking, payment, the space my wife and I took up, cleaning up after us, the free chips and salsa, etc. So maybe the restaurant wishes I got the 70% burrito but I paid 85% of the cost.

There was a great soul food restaurant in my home town which sold biologically appropriate portions for prices not much less than you usually pay for oversized entrees. I think one reason they didn't last was that people perceived it as a poor value.

>Should we have sets of fixed package weights and volumes for food and beverages?

Requiring prominent notices of size changes would fix this problem without the government to dictate what size formats are allowed.

Mandate that the unit price needs to be front and center (like it already is for many things), and mandate what that unit must be for a given type of product. Many times I've seen even the same exact product in different sizes, but one unit priced in $/oz, one in $/lbs, and one in $/qty100, effectively making existing unit price labeling useless. If the units were fixed, people would be able to build an intuition for how much the unit price for a given product should be.

I don't think of an especially workable way, but an inflation-linked multi-year price-per-weight history for the product on the price label?

I'm sure it would be instantly worked around because shrinkflators are already busily playing sneaky tricks. Probably they'd just slap "great new taste" on it every year and pretend it's a new product.

Package sizes were regulated in the EU starting in the 70s, presumably for this reason, but they've been deregulated in the last decade (other than alcohol).

Here is an idea: Incentivize the supermarkets to display price/100g or similar, like they do in the grocery section sometimes.

There shouldn’t be such a law. If anything there should be a law showing the price per gram for all products in all categories in all settings.

Please, stop making silly laws and let the market work.