Shrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
The burger patties were absolutely not 1/8 pound. I can assure you from experience as a Professional McDonald's Worker in 2003 that those were 10:1 patties then as well. I can also vouch for the same from another major burger chain circa 2001. I'm sure they shrink everything possible, but interestingly they haven't been shaving down the beef quantities for some reason.
I worked at McDonald’s a decade prior to that, and they were 10:1 then, too. I think it’s possible and maybe likely some other chains might have switched from being 8:1 to 10:1 since the market leaders already had that size. There are much better examples though than some isolated regional player’s beef patty sizes.
We used to buy half gallons and gallons of ice cream. Brands started selling 60 or 62 ounces instead of 64. Over the years, it’s gotten to where some brands sell 48 ounces - three pints - instead of 64.
Breakfast cereals have had similar shrinking sizes.
Shrinkflation is to me the best example of why pure short-term-ism is a cancer. The first jackass to do it, say by taking a soup can of 16 ounces and adjusting it to 15.75oz, it boosted the profits that quarter. Mathematically, we could keep asymptotically shaving the size by 1.6% every couple years forever, but IRL that won't work because the amounts needed to be shaved would get so small as to not have the cost savings effect (or even be possible to precisely measure). So in reality the amounts need to be more like an actual quarter or half ounce at a time. So at some point the soup can, the candy bar, etc. would become so small that with one more shrink, people will recognize that it can't even feed one person, and at that point, all the "value" that was extracted by the previous CEOs to goose their stock price short term will be exhausted, and they'll have to move on to watering it down or whatever. But our packages will stay that idiotic minimum size forever.
Don't you remember how they recovered from this after 2008? That's when they started selling "family size" options that are bigger, but with a not-so-obvious price increase where you can't really tell if it's more or less expensive per oz.
Price-conscious shoppers still buy the smaller thing if it's cheaper per oz (and only if the stores show the price per oz on the shelf), but most people just get the bigger size because that's how much they want to consume, and they can't really tell that the 15% increase in size does not equate to 19% increase in cost.
Many stores would stock the family size separate from the regular size so the shoppers couldnt easily compare price per oz.
Eventually the family size just becomes the regular size, but now at the higher price. Then the shrinking happens again.
> (and only if the stores show the price per oz on the shelf)
Legal requirement that they do in the UK (though in metric units), so it's £/L and £/Kg (or for smaller items per 100g and then some nuance on unit prices for things not sold by weight/volume).
It does make their shenanigans with multipacks and such way more obvious by design.
> The PMO also requires traders, where applicable, to display the ‘unit price’ – which is the price which would be charged for the relevant unit of the goods, depending upon how the goods are sold. Unit pricing can be a useful tool for consumers. It allows consumers to compare the price and value of similar products. This can be helpful when making a decision between similar products that are sold in different sizes or quantities.
Many have noticed that the super large sizes at Costco, etc. often are more expensive per item or oz. than the sale price of a regular size at a Shoprite or whatever.
Interesting comment. I d noticed the family sizes that I used to see in the cereal isle are not as common. I wonder if they are preparing for a re-introduction.
This is very old, though. The Roman era experienced monetary inflation through "coin clipping", which was literally shaving bits of silver off coins and remelting it together. This is why modern era coins often have milled tamper-evident edges, even if the metal is no longer worth the face value.
I was surprised to see a real reference because I thought the 100% beef thing was a 100% myth.
But that article confirms in several places that independent testing finds no fillers at all, and what is left is just "Plaintiffs allege that undisclosed processing steps or agents applied during production or cooking could alter the accuracy of the “100%” claim." It's not a very convincing argument and it would be quite hard for McDonalds to cover up a secret process to add another ingredient.
> Additionally, the visual gap between advertised burgers and actual burgers raises separate false advertising issues
Meanwhile, the very clear and obvious false advertising they actually perform is getting hardly any attention. Here's to hoping they won't be able to continue advertising products that are different from what they sell.
I recall a similar claim regarding pop music compilation CDs advertised as being performed by "The Original Cast", which was really a group by that name playing covers of popular songs.
Or another being "Made in USA", where Usa was a city in Korea.
the tricks never worked legally speaking. misleading labels stay misleading even if you have a trademark on that name and use it for years.
the problem is cases like this rarely go to court, and plaintiffs might run into a judge who literally doesnt believe consumer fraud is a thing if theres at least one possible non fraud interpretation no matter how unlikely it is.
any bottle labeled or marketed as "Scotch" in Japan must strictly comply with the UK's Scotch Whisky Regulations. Because Scotch Whisky (スコッチ・ウィスキー) is legally recognized and registered in Japan as the legal equivalent of a protected denomination of origin.
Even that doesn't mean that the patty is JUST beef. Thanks to legalese, the only thing a claim like that would guarantee is that the beef portion of the hamburger patty is "100% PURE ALL-AMERICAN BEEF".
There is no evidence that McDonalds has included any filler in their burgers at all (at least in recent history). See the link in the cousin-comment for more information on what has been claimed and what has been proven (so far): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247943
> the beef portion of the hamburger patty is "100% PURE ALL-AMERICAN BEEF"
But the claim isn't about "the beef portion". If what you say is true it would give a competitor the chance to say "McD's burgers are 100% unhealthy fat" because the unhealthy fat portion is 100% unhealthy fat.
> It could be 99% filler and not be a lie.
I doubt it. Not sure about the US but in Europe there are laws that tell you how much or how little of something you can have before you advertise that thing. For example you can't say "now with less sugar" if you reduced the quantity of sugar by 0.001g. And you can't call it "olive oil" if it has 2% olive oil.
> And you can't call it "olive oil" if it has 2% olive oil.
Which is still way too lax. It should only be called olive oil when it's 100% olive oil. You can pick some other name like "olive oil based" or "unholy mixture of the cheapest gutter oils we could find" which clearly indicates that what you are selling is in fact a combination of oils.
I forgot to mention, my bad, I used some random numbers. The EU "nutrition claims" numbers are here [1]. If you want to claim "less salt" then it must contain at least 25% less. For most other ingredients it's 30%, so you can't advertise "less X" forever because you reduce 1 nanogram at at time.
For olive oil you can find the details here [2]. As above, there's no such thing as "the olive oil part was olive oil". The label is for the product.
The US probably has something similar, even if watered down.
Which is why I say people claiming that inflation is at least 2x undercounted relative to lived experience are right. Everything diminishes, all across the board. Materials get cheaper. Service quality gets lower - and when it doesn't, all the incidentals around it get worse.
My go-to example: your local hairdresser may keep the same prices (adjusted for the official inflation or otherwise), but over the years, they may have stopped serving coffee and started offering only water. The salon used to be beautiful and stylish, and now looks dirty and furnished with cheapest bargain-bin business store furniture. Flowers are gone or replaced with cheap plastics. Toilets never have toilet paper in it, faucet always leaking. Waiting room sofas got replaced with cheap chairs. Even the magazines are gone, and in their place you just get leaflets. Etc.
Repeat the same for your local grocery store, parking lot, car dealership, bus stop, airport, cinema, everything.
The second half of the inflation is literally everywhere, in everything - it can be easily seen once you start looking for it. And after that, you can't unsee it.
Companies hate raising prices, or more specifically customers hate it when prices are raised so companies don't like to do it. especially in foods. As such the go-to dance to keep up with inflation is to reduce the size while keeping the price the same as long as possible, when this becomes too noticeable the size is returned to original the price is increased and a big 20% more is added to the package. Repeat as needed.
Note that this is the most charitable interpretation where the customer deception is fairly minor(inflation happens, gotta sneak that price increase in there some how) Stuff like deceptive packaging(make it look like there is more than is actually present) punts it into the outright evil category.
Yep. People blame companies, but ultimately they are doing what the customer 'wants'. Same with things like separate fees for credit cards, or shipping. Customers don't like seeing an extra fee, so companies roll it all together - even if it often means they end up paying more in the long run.
the customer doesnt want higher prices or smaller items. This is a dirty trick to try and make customers not notice that the quality is worse
ultimately the company is taking part in the government's goal to keep a certain level of inflation, rather than just its own desire to screw customers and make the number go up. If the government wasnt in on it, there would be regulations around shrinkflation
Companies like Mars, Inc don't care a hoot about what the level of inflation is. They care about their shareholders, who care about stock growth. Anything else is completely and totally irrelevant for them.
Higher prices -> customer unhappy -> less sales -> stock price go down
Smaller bars -> hopefully customer doesn't notice -> same sales -> stock OK
That's the only logic in here. The prices of the ingredients have gone up, so they're forced with that choice.
1) they're colluding to do this, or more accurately that they don't have to collude to do this, since the brands have all been bought up by monopolies. Shrinkflation would be obvious if it sat next to the original products on the shelves. Instead, Mars or Unilever etc. own almost entire categories of food and control how they are shelved.
2) They aren't being regulated to make the distinction clear to customers, and even allowed to intentionally obscure it by doing things like blowing more air into a less full chip bag, and
3) the fact that modern food companies are simply holding companies for portfolios of historic trademarks that they can use to trade on the history of those brands while cheapening the ingredients.
On 3), we've long since arrived in a period when the generic is usually better than the brand name, because the generic has to compete on cost for value, and the brand has assumed value from the brand-loyal that allows the ingredients to be cheapened without losing customers. It's the brand that is premium, not what's in the package.
I actually think the metric system offered a bit of concealment on shrinkflation - things were once sold in standard unit sizes, and sometimes selling them (especially the fancy ones) in metric unit sizes got people used to seeing strange long decimal standard unit sizes in things they were used to buying by the pound or the quart.
Gallons of milk didn't shrink, but I think the fact that a lot of us were drinking fancy imported coffees gave those room to go crazy with bag sizes. The flour I buy is still in a 5lb bag, but if flour sellers all decided to go 2 kilos one day at the same price, a lot of people wouldn't notice (or would get used to it.)
Mars, Inc is a private, family-owned company. Presumably they still like making money, but the stereotype of daily stock price obsessed CEO doesn't apply here as there is no traded stock.
While it might seem fair to blame the company here, I would like to point out that many people with limited budgets (and this includes children receiving allowances, not just adults with a weekly cap on their grocery budget) would prefer a smaller portion of something to not being able to buy it at all. I am not talking about the soda can scam I despise with the 7.5oz cans when you can only buy a 12oz can in a twelve-pack in many places instead of a six pack now (this annoys the crap out of me). I am talking about the fact that inflation raises prices, and raising prices often prices customers out of things.
Companies don't like losing customers, and loyal customers who like certain products do not like being forced to choose between two "less full" sized products, or one product this week and two next week (or whatever; imagine being able to buy either a bottle of cold brew or a carton of creamer, OR simply having to settle for less of both).
Keeping the price roughly similar might seem like a scam but if you're some random person who really really feels their day sucks without something, would you like being priced out of it instead of disciplining yourself without any interference to merely have it a day or two less per week?
I am pretty sure few people really believe they are getting the same amount after a week or two of that smaller cereal box or whatever.
I believe that in all of EU you can just look at the ”comparison price” which is per-weight and listed below the normal price. It’s also very useful for quickly comparing similar products directly in-store. It’s a great piece of no-nonsense regulation that counters a lot of the deception, and instead favors competition on the price-quality axis, ie healthy market dynamics.
The per unit price tends to be pretty small print though so you need to actively look for it which means that deceiving customers via shrinkflation is still possible as most repeat customers will only look at the physical packaging size and the sticker price which can both stay the same while decreasing fill size and increasing per unit size accordingly.
And you also sometimes get different units being used for related products. And of course then there are cases the the amount of product is not the relevant unit for price comparison because different competitor formulas need different amounts for the same effect. Still plenty of tricks that unscrupulous companies can use in the EU.
Call it blame, call it something else, but they are in the end changing the product while hiding it. I get these emails sometimes, probably because of regulations:
- We are changing the price from X to Y. [tirade about rising prices]
Maybe they should hang this in the restaurant:
- The THING is now smaller than January 2026. [And it’s your fault. You misers don’t want higher prices? Well have you heard of the Central Bank? ...]
That last part is optional.
The consumer is the last part in the value chain of cow to beef patty so of course he or she just has himself or herself to blame.
Or people could just stop buying Mars bars and other ultra-processed foods if they feel they are overpriced which would force corporations to adjust their policies. Mars, Nestle, McDonalds etc. will continue increasing prices as long as people keep buying regardless of how much they complain.
The pricing of normal raw food products, produce etc. is generally quite transparent.
Unfortunately, "external regulators" are both human, and subject to the self-serving whims of the power-hungry politicians.
Plus, nowadays, a "justice" system which might well decide that Badguys Inc. has a First Amendment Right to label and sell 10 1/2 oz. of inspection-failing mystery meat as "1 Pound Pure Prime Beef".
20 years is too long in the past, so indeed computers were more expensive then.
But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.
2011 was actually the last year when I bought a computer with only 16 GB of DRAM, but today I hope to not need a computer any time soon, because I would not be able to buy as much memory as I want and as much memory as I have in my old computers, bought at a time when they were much cheaper than today.
Not only DRAM, SSDs and HDDs have exploded in price, but also the mini-PCs with Intel or AMD CPUs have a double price than last year, when bought as barebones, without memory.
For now, it is not obvious how much the prices have increased, because there are on the market a lot of obsolete computers that have remained unsold from the previous years, and which are cheap, but if you would want an up-to-date model that would be a true upgrade over whatever old computer you have, then the price is steep. (That means that for example in the case of barebone mini-PCs you can find cheap models with Intel Arrow Lake H or AMD Zen 4 CPUs, e.g. around $500, but the corresponding models with Panther Lake or Zen 5 are double in price, e.g. around $1000.)
> But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.
Some of the individual components may still be relatively expensive, but overall I don't think this is true at all. Compare a 2026 macbook pro with a 2011 macbook pro at a similar price and the 2026 model is gonna blow the 2011 model out of the water on any benchmark you care to use.
“how long it takes to open the browser and load a web page”.
a 2011 laptop will likely perform the same on this metric with a contemporary website. (a 2011 website with a 2011 laptop, and a 2026 laptop with a 2026 website).
“how long it takes to load the mail app and send a mail”
probably the 2011 laptop out performs on this metric.
I’m sure the modern laptop is a few times more powerful in terms of raw compute, but lets not confuse compute with utility, because better laptops should mean more capabilities, not more shitty developer harnesses to make the same programs we had before.
Yeah this blows my mind. My work laptops were pretty powerful with 16GB RAM 15 years ago, 8GB was also fine. Now people say you need 32 or 64 minimum just to function, that these 8GB MacBook neos are "entry level" for students and kids.
I know it's all "back in my day" but back in my day (15 years ago) everything was generally software so the laptop was computing more, now everything is a website but the laptops need 32GB to not run like through tar.
Both of my arm MacBook pros hang from time to time doing basic tasks. It's ridiculous and at least one nice side effect of a ram shortage might be developers starting to care about memory footprint again
This is another form of shrinkflation. Software quality (specifically performance) has cratered so that it could be built cheaper, faster, and with more ads.
It can be interesting seeing what is often seen as a common task can make computers of that vintage suddenly start to struggle when they can seem to do so many other tasks just fine.
One common thing I've experienced is browser-based video conferencing. A lot of chips in that generation didn't really have a lot of hardware accelerated video codecs, so a number of things have to rely on pure software and thus really crank the CPU. Meanwhile a cheap modern mobile chip can handle those same video streams without even breaking a sweat, due to having accelerators for those video codecs.
I don't think this is a good argument. To be sure there has been a big jump in prices lately; we are familiar with the reasons so I'm not going to restate them here.
It happens that i just upgraded my main computer and phone, from >10 years old to >3 years old. And certainly I'm conscious of the fact that if I'd done this a year or even 6 months ago I'd have saved maybe 15% over what I paid. On the other hand, I'm also very conscious of that fact that the new gear is far more performant; the RAM is faster, the memory bus is wider, the system architecture is massively more efficient, there's specialized logic that just doesn't exist on my older machines. So I think it's a big mistake to say 'xGB of RAM costs the same now as 15 years ago' when it's performing ~10x beter.
The price of DRAM and SSDs might be back to a similar price as 20 years ago with the recent price spikes, but if they're the same price I'll probably take a high end computer from today than a high end computer from 15 years ago.
> But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.
Uhm, in 2011 4 GB RAM was the standard for PCs (some were still sold with only 2 GB), 8 GB was already enthusiast territory. 16 GB was a professional workstation.
Simple programs with simple functionality becoming massive and networked and somehow less functional is the other side of shrinkflation. The reason they became huge was developer convenience i.e. they cut costs.
We had a good run where PCs were not very popular (all the "PC is dying" headlines we got, huh) and the parts were improving so fast that there was a healthy second hand market with aggressive prices.
Nowadays you get a cpu that's 10% every 2 years (or every 4 if you don't take into account amd 3d cache parts) and a gpu that is basically the same with better RT performance (unless you pay an obscene amount of cash for the nvidia top of the line).
Second hand market is way worse as parts last longer being relevant and prices in retail and second hand markets go up as result. Put on top of that a crypto frenzy followed by an AI frenzy and the DIY market has been in a dark age for a decade.
I'd say a pc you buy today is more performant for the price than one bought 10 years earlier. But 10 years earlier you could get yourself something very nice for 500 bucks and today you just can't do that as entry level everything starts at like 700 bucks or more.
If you measure ‘bang’ by hardware metrics, they’re clearly orders of magnitude better value today. But if ‘bang’ means usefulness at solving life’s problems, it’s harder to compare, because the problems have changed so much, and so many of them now come from computers.
yes, they have more hardware power, but the bloated software requires more hardware power, so in most cases it doesn't really translate into gains for the user
So are video games. The GTA6 pricing controversy has been really confusing, this is one of the cheapest games of its story/depth size in all video gaming history.
20 perhaps, but just about. Probably not 10 years and certainly not 5 years ago (obviously they are way faster now, but from the perspective of normal users running software designed based on the constraints of the hardware available at the time)
Here's an example beauro of transportation article that has a downward slope in inflation adjusted price over the last 30 years (Fig 1). Not sure what explains the diff in our links.
The previously-linked chart appears to show the rate-of-change of the airfare, by itself. It shows how airfare prices themselves went up or down over time, as a percentage, without taking anything else into consideration. That can be useful data, but it is not at all the kind of inflation-adjusted chart that we're used to seeing.
Your link shows charts that include airfare prices integrated with inflation. That's closer to the kind of charts that we're used to seeing when inflation comes up. But it doesn't say which Consumer Price Index (there are many!) was used for adjustment, so that's annoying; it's hard to establish what it means exactly. It's also lacking in granularity and history.
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I usually find that FRED is better for this stuff. The generated charts include citations for source data and also whatever maths were used in the final presentation.
Here's a chart from FRED of airfare price index over time, adjusted by inflation using the usual All Items, Urban Consumers price index. (There's some error included here since that latter index includes transportation and transportation includes airfare, but it seems like that's in the realm of 1% or so and I can only work with the tools that I have.)
The vertical scale set so that 100 = June 1, 2026 because that's what I picked (but anyone can pick a different date for 100 using the Edit Graph link; the shape of the line stays the same).
Anyway, it shows that flights are pretty cheap ~right now. The data doesn't show that it's cheaper-than-ever (that happened in May of 2020), but it's pretty darned cheap anyway even with the ongoing war in Ukraine and the stuff that has been going on in Iran.
The phrase "exception that proves the rule" refers to an apparent exception to the rule's outputs actually being explained by it having divergent inputs, i.e. if you claim P=>Q, then the exception that proves the rule would be an instance of ~Q=>~P.
What's different about computers that makes this applicable here?
Both usages are common, and Wikipedia references both of them. But in the sense that it was being used, "rules can have exceptions, therefore this exception 'proves' the rule rather than falsifying it" is not valid, and is not consistent with either usage.
The term is often also used simply as claiming the existence of a rule by claiming the exception.
It's one of those terms where I am pretty confident that I see the original use more rarely than the technically incorrect variations to the point I'd hesitate to call them incorrect any more.
> This meaning of the phrase, which for Fowler is the original and clearest meaning ... This argument states if an exception exists or has to be stated, then this exception proves that there must be some rule to which the case is an exception
So no, OP used the correct definition and no wide spread usage uses ~Q=>~P. That's a weird logical formulation that was randomly concocted.
> So no, OP used the correct definition and no wide spread usage uses ~Q=>~P. That's a weird logical formulation that was randomly concocted.
No, most logically coherent usage of that phrase absolutely does reflect ~Q=>~P, which was not "randomly concocted", but was rather was determined via logical reasoning.
> Rule: It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
> Exception: computers i think are more affordable now than even 20 years ago, in bang for buck
> This proves the rule because if it's an exception to the rule, therefore the rule must exist in the first place.
No, a standalone claim that contradicts the premise of a previously claimed general rule does not "prove" that original claim.
If I say "it hasn't rained all week" and you respond with "but it did rain on Tuesday", you're pointing out evidence that falsifies the general claim about it not raining, not demonstrating an exception that strengthens its validity otherwise.
This usage only makes sense if the "exceptional" claim is formulated as an exception to some unstated assumption, but even there, does not actually substantiate the validity of that assumption, but rather just reveals that the assumption is being made.
Another commenter offered a good example of this: "no parking on Saturdays" carries the implied premise that parking is permitted on other days of the week: it's nature as an imperative statement that applies special treatment to a particular case implies that the general case is something else.
But "computers have become cheaper over the past 20 years" does not in itself imply any assumptions about general economic trends or other categories of goods, and certainly doesn't prove the validity any assumptions about either.
No I am not. What you're demonstrating is exactly the basis for why the new usage is spreading.
Poster 2 has raised a disagreement with the original claim. There was no implied rule. Poster 3 used the claim of it being an exception to imply a third rule that neither of the first two posters had claimed, as opposed to making a statement where the exception demonstrated the existence of a rule in the first place.
If you're going to make false claims and lie about my intent, then at least don't be entirely wrong while doing it.
If you're going to continue this thread you can talk to yourself - I have no interest in continuing a discussion when you start lying about my intent.
> I don't know what they put into pizza "dough" but it's not real flour.
This is a weird claim. Wheat is so incredibly cheap in the developed world; why would you bother with a substitute for a regular pizza? Also, can you share any specifics or details? Honestly, I don't really believe your claim.
Some clever fellow decided to shave a nickel by padding their shredded parmesan with sawdust and now the other brands of parmesan have "No cellulose!" on the label as if that is a selling point. Which it is, now, alas.
A similar law in the US exists to prevent non-food being put inside food. It's why kinder surprise is banned in the US. It's not because Americans are "too stupid" to avoid choking, it's because the rule already existed and there's not really a good justification to change it for the sake of a foreign candy company.
Reminds me of the Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act passed in Britain in 1860 to try to stop bakers from adulterating bread in all kind of unhealthy ways..
In the best case, you might have had chalk added to whiten your bread. In worse cases, alum..
there are different flours available which vary in suitability for different purposes and in cost. King Arthur Flour has a computer controlled mill and they offer a service to bread makers to let them specify their own "recipe" for the flour they wish to order.
"French bakers will use straight flour in their bread making; North Americans and British generally don’t.
"Straight flour is separated by sifting in other grades. The straight flour is passed along a roller over different sieves. Different grades fall through the appropriate sieve along the roller. In the percentages given below, the lower the percentage of straight flour that falls through a particular grading sieve, the more desirable the flour."
It's annoying how flours are graded differently in different countries and following recipes from other countries becomes much harder because you need a spreadsheet to figure out the equivalent local grade and often it just isn't available in normal super markets who prefer to stock ten different brands of the same 2-5 grades instead of actual variety. /rant
>why would you bother with a substitute for a regular pizza?
Shelf life, reduced calories, ease of working with, etc, etc. Basically all those secondary goals you optimize for once it's a given that the pizza will pizza properly.
"Ice cream" has a legal minimum density floor of 4.5lbs per gallon. It has been that way since 1958. If they're mixing more air than that per gallon, they can't legally call it "ice cream".
> The term "ice cream" is pretty well regulated in the US. Really shows where our priorities are as Americans.
Most natural food products are regulated in the US [0]. Ice cream is not unique in this regard, nor is the standard is particularly onerous compared to others. It easily fits on single page [1].
I agree, and my point about "really shows where our priorities are" was meant halfway in jest.
It is interesting to me though that we make such a big point to regulate even things like "ice cream" and "potato chip" with labeling regulations but then so much else of our food industry seems to be pretty open. There aren't requirements of what a "chocolate chip cookie" is, for instance.
Not that I'm arguing for repealing the regulations we have currently, I do like to know the "ice cream" I'm buying meets these minimum standards.
And a lot of 'ice cream' tubs in the "ice cream" section of your grocery store are "frozen dairy desert" not ice cream. They are packaged like Ice Cream, flavored like Ice cream, and appear to be Ice Cream. But the words Ice Cream do not appear and instead a hard to spot "frozen dairy desert" is somewhere on the packaging.
If they want to make a frozen concoction of a ton of candy bars and cookies and fudge and milk and sugar and churn it all up to be nearly the consistency of chunky whipped cream I don't see any reason to not allow that to be sold as a product if we're allowing all that candy and what not anyways. I'm glad its not allowed to be labelled ice cream.
And if they're making a product like that, where else would you prefer for that to be put? In between the porkchops and the steaks? Maybe between the crackers and the chips?
I don't quite get where you're going with this other than to suggest they shouldn't even be allowed to make such a thing at all and sell it in stores.
The point is its another phenomenon similar to the shrinkflation and quiet ingredient substitution. I'm commenting on how the not-technically-human marketing creatures try to get you to think that you're buying ice cream when you're buying something else of lesser value.
Particularly when its something like Breyer's light - its literally sold next to the Ice cream equivalent from Breyers and is designed to be ice cream in all but density requirements. Most people would call it ice cream and never know its designed to trick them into accepting something that is lesser quality for the same price.
As to where I'm going with it - well I'm just pointing out another form of the stupid shit. I can't wait to see how you flip out when I point out all the ways that they try to trick people into believing they are buying meat.
> try to get you to think that you're buying ice cream when you're buying something else of lesser value.
Maybe people sometimes do want the stuff loaded with fudge and candy bars and cake crumbles and whipped to nearly the consistency of whipped cream? Maybe sometimes people don't mind the tradeoff of it being whipped more so it still satisfies similar cravings and desires while being less calories per bite?
I don't exactly see why its "the stupid shit" and makes people less human to concoct such things. I say let them have their fun, just make sure its actually labeled if things are "ice cream" or not, as I usually prefer the basic "ice cream". Once again, should these products just not be allowed to be sold at all? What changes to their labeling do you think are needed? Are they not allowed to actually show the product at all on the label or something?
And yeah, it makes sense to stick the Breyers products next to the Breyers products. Once again where else would they put it? Wouldn't it be a bit more of PITA if the Breyers products were just kind of randomly strewn all over the place? You're seeing such negativity and bringing so much hatred for what seems to be like pretty obvious placement decisions. Ice cream like things are all around each other, similar brand products are grouped together. Are you also upset that sorbets are usually right next to the ice cream?
You seem very upset that I'm pointing out a slimy marketing tactic.
It's simple - people will think these things are ice cream, because they are sold in a way to intentionally make them easy to mistake for ice cream with the goal of blurring the lines reducing product cost without people noticing they are getting an inferior substitute. It's similar to (but distinct from) lowering the amount of goods in a box without reducing the size of the box (shrinkflation), with a similar goal.
> Maybe people sometimes do want the stuff loaded with fudge and candy bars and cake crumbles and whipped to nearly the consistency of whipped cream?
You're really stuck on this - I specifically pointed out Breyers light vanilla, which is not this at all. In fact, nearly everyone served this would just call it ice cream, and evidenced in this very thread where someone stated "theres so much air whipped into ice cream these days". That's the point.
> And yeah, it makes sense to stick the Breyers products next to the Breyers products.
Nabisco cracker products are in a whole different aisle than Nabisco cookie products. More relevantly, Nabisco saltines are with the other brand saltines, not on the same shelf as cheeze-its. You see Kraft mayo in the mayo section, and kraft mustard in the mustard section of the condiments aisle. I think its reasonable to put Breyers ice cream in an ice cream section and Breyer's light in a frozen-desert section of the freezer aisle, and not at all obvious why they aren't.
> I don't exactly see why its "the stupid shit" and makes people less human to concoct such things
The people who concoct them are fine. The ones who are less than human are the ones who use tricks to fool people into thinking they are ice cream. I mean even the name in the example "Breyers Light" - most things that are "light" are the same product with less sugar or fat or salt not a wholly different thing (e.g. Bud light is still beer (cue jokes from the beer snobs)) - are another trick to lead to confusion because its no longer ice cream.
> You seem very upset that I'm pointing out a slimy marketing tactic.
I think he's objecting to you presumptively calling it a "slimy marketing tactic" to offer a product that some people clearly do enjoy and are willing to pay for, but which doesn't strictly conform to the legal definition of a specific product category, and which therefore must be labelled as something else.
> It's simple - people will think these things are ice cream,
Because they are within the "ice cream" category in the general vernacular sense: people are buying these products because they do satisfy their taste for ice cream. They're labelled differently because the labeling regulations are applying hard-and-fast boundaries to fuzzy-edged categories.
If you want to have clear, objective rules, you need to set hard boundaries, but that always entails that there will be edge cases that people will debate about, but which will need to be settled on one side of the boundary or the other.
If you're going to set technical, quantitative standards for what can be called "ice cream", some products that people regard as ice cream, and consume accordingly, will always end up falling outside that definition.
> You seem very upset that I'm pointing out a slimy marketing tactic.
I'm not the one calling people non-human and using terms like "the stupid shit" and assuming conspiracies that can easily be described with logically sorting like items. I'm just really trying to understand the mind of someone so angry about people enjoying different kinds of deserts and so the makers of those desires are now inhuman for sticking their frozen dairy products in the frozen dairy section.
> I think its reasonable to put Breyers ice cream in an ice cream section and Breyer's light in a frozen-desert section of the freezer aisle
Wouldn't that be immediately next to and surrounding the "ice cream" subsection? Like maybe novelties, frozen dairy deserts, ice cream, sorbets, that sound reasonable? Wouldn't you then logically put the brands like Breyers that make both kinds of products at the edge of the "ice cream" and the "frozen dairy desert" section? Isn't having them be the border of both sections then still the same end result you're dehumanizing people over? Should the government be required to have these products separated by 15 feet and have big flashing warning lights announcing the separation of those sections? How much separation do you require to meet your standards?
Are their frozen dairy deserts really the same level is dissimilar as ketchup is to mustard? Or are they essentially just like different "flavors" of the same base concept? Personally I (and I imagine many other people) could just swap a "real ice cream" for a "frozen dairy desert" and probably not care too much, but if I put mustard in something calling for ketchup or vice-versa it's definitely not going to end up the same!
> Personally I (and I imagine many other people) could just swap a "real ice cream" for a "frozen dairy desert" and probably not care too much
This is a fun statement. It's a complete reversal of the opinion you've had most of this thread. You're just arguing semantics and don't care that ice cream is different. My point is always, and has always been that the frozen dair deserts that aren't ice cream are a way of selling less product (lower density = less actual milk, sugar, etc) at the same price, in a way that invokes the previous status quo.
As for sorting: There is no ontological reason some things are sorted by brand and some things are sorted by type. It's purely marketing saying "we'll give you a slightly better deal if you keep our brand together in one big section rather than sorting on types". It's branding deals with the supermarkets - thats the only logic to it.
And btw - i never called for any government regulation of anything, even the name ice cream. I never called for flashing lights. I just said it makes sense to sort things that are different categories by category instead of brand.
Me suggesting I probably wouldn't care too much if I sometimes got a "frozen dairy desert" instead of "ice cream" isn't a complete reversal from me saying I usually prefer basic ice cream. If I said I usually like vanilla but later I said I wouldn't mind too much if I got chocolate also be a "complete reversal"? I still usually prefer vanilla, but hey its a sweet frozen treat, I'm still pretty happy in the end. If someone said "hey want some ice cream?" and they dished out some "frozen dairy desert" I probably would be ok with it instead of acting all disgusted and call them subhuman.
As for putting the same brand together, a lot of people like to shop by looking at the brand. Take your earlier example of crackers. There's a ton of varieties of Cheez-its and "cheese-flavored crackers". Should they break up all the different flavors of Cheez-its and have them all over the aisle, or would it kind of make sense to group all the different flavors and varieties of Cheez-its together so people shopping for Cheez-its can see the different flavors of Cheez-its? Seems like a pretty logical way to do things to me.
Going back to ice cream, should they also have a section for only vanilla, only chocolate, only strawberry, only neapolitan, only mint chocolate chip, and have all the brands placed in those groups? Whenever a company makes a new flavor, we have to shift all these groups around to make a space for that new flavor even if they're the only entrant for that flavor. One has to hunt for the spot where Moo-llennium Crunch fits in Might as well have the brands grouped together. I'd rather see all the varieties of Blue Bell in one place as it makes it easier to find the specific items.
> I probably would be ok with it instead of acting all disgusted and call them subhuman.
I never said this, i never implied this. I never even mentioned a preference for one over the other. The only things i suggested were lesser were the marketing creatures who choose to give up their humanity to lie and scam for a living instead of doing honest work and creating value.
You seem very upset that my point is this "frozen dairy desert" phenomenon trying to replace ice cream is a phenomenon like shrinkflation. They have convinced you that its just ice cream (per your words) and somehow are irrationally upset that I'm calling out that its less ingredients and product for the same price that.
Again I'm not calling for any changes, all my examples are just how the marketing things are designed to get people to not notice that they are getting less for the same price. I don't particularly care how the grocery store is arranged, just that the choice to put some things by brand and some things by type is not explainable other than by marketing/branding.
(and btw, grocery stores rearrange shelves for new products all the freaking time, your argument fails on the face of it - marketing departments come to stores and say "we want to buy a section of shelf space just for our brand", which is the real reason some things are organized by brand and others by type. You're also failing to think in 2 dimensions, because you'll often see columns of type, and rows of brand.. so all the canned stewed tomatoes are a column, then the canned diced tomatoes, then tomato paste, etc).
The mistake you are making is that you are conflating technical definitions used for regulating product labeling with the general understanding and preferences of consumers in how they relate product categories together.
Ideally, these would be closely aligned, but given that the former is a set of mutually exclusive category definitions bounded by precise quantitative variables, and the latter are overlapping clines that people make varied subjective judgments about, it's impossible to have perfect alignment, and edge cases like the ones you're discussing here will naturally proliferate.
> I don't particularly care how the grocery store is arranged
You're calling people subhuman because of the way grocery stores are arranged. That seems like the opposite of not caring.
> You seem very upset that my point is this "frozen dairy desert" phenomenon trying to replace ice cream is a phenomenon like shrinkflation. They have convinced you that its just ice cream (per your words) and somehow are irrationally upset that I'm calling out that its less ingredients and product for the same price that.
Or, in an alternative light, its the market reacting to customer preferences.
> They have convinced you that its just ice cream (per your words)
I have never said it is "just ice cream", I just said I and many other people see them as pretty similar products and can often swap them out without too much concern. I still like that there are government rules about what is legally "ice cream" so its more obvious what one is buying, but that doesn't mean I don't see the two kinds of products pretty similar. Almost always, soft serve is also not legally "ice cream", but in the end I sometimes tell the kids "if you eat more of the veggies you can get some ice cream" after and maybe that'll be a bit of soft serve. Would you expect the kids are going to complain to me about how I promised "ice cream" and instead they got soft serve? No, because generally speaking to most people in most situations they're fairly fungible. They're the same basic concept. Something sweet, creamy, kind of soft, and frozen.
Once again, if a friend offers me a bowl of it, its not exactly the end of the world. Lots of people like the highly whipped varieties because its whipped more and so is softer, less calories for the same portion size (the size of what you eat and how its arranged is often also related to satiety) and what not. I've been known to sometimes (not most of the time, not reversing my stance that I usually prefer vanilla ice cream) buy stuff like Dryers Slow Churned because its so light and airy when I was looking for something less heavy than regular ice cream. And sometimes I really like soft serve, despite that also not legally being ice cream. It wouldn't be the same product if it had to meet the government definition of "ice cream", it would probably be worse if it had to.
And for a consumer choosing a "frozen dairy desert" because its got a ton of cookies mixed in it, one can hardly claim its because they're being duped that its not "real ice cream", they want the variety with too many cookies or cake chunks or candybars or whatever to legally be called ice cream. The whole point of the product is to be loaded with non ice cream things while kind of being the same style of desert.
> I'm calling out that its less ingredients and product for the same price
And a thin crust pizza is technically less pizza for often the same price as the traditional crust. Shrinkflation! Those greedy subhuman people selling thin crust pizza, how terrible they are. Or maybe people like thin crust too. But hey, there aren't really the same government standards of "what is legally a pizza" as "what is legally ice cream", so its seen as a non-issue.
> Really shows where our priorities are as Americans.
I don't think you can discern priorities from actions unless those actions entail a manifest trade-off between mutually exclusive options, which doesn't seem to be the case here.
I have no clue to the history of it, but personally speaking when I'm serving myself some ice cream I'm eyeballing the volume of ice cream not measuring it on a scale. Even when I buy froyo and I literally am paying by the ounce I'm usually thinking about the size of it as I add stuff and not necessarily thinking exactly about the weight.
That's why crap companies like Dreyers mostly doesn't sell it anymore, they sell "Frozen Dairy Dessert" in fine print but with giant ice-cream-evocative words above it.
A solid block does not eat well either. I'm responding to the decline of ice cream products over a long time. Most of what we get now isn't even ice cream. What I make at home is technically frozen custard.
To be honest, for some things, getting a smaller serving and/or higher price is a blessing in disguise - health-wise at least. Same with soda servings where very large cups or bottles encourage higher consumption.
I was genuinely curious to see what the legally mandated calorie/ingredient content labelling was in 1991 on a UK Mars bar, but sadly no pictures of the underside.
While I've no doubts shrinkflation explains a great deal of this, it would be interesting if increased mandatory food content reporting on packaging had even a small effect on reducing the calorie content of confectionery over time, as consumers could more easily compare etc and market responded with products in portion sizes to better fit preferences.
You can even see in the article photo, the more recent modern Mars bar has the calorific content printed on the front, in addition to the big label all UK food has on the rear. The 1991 example does not.
Called Big Gulp because it was initially the largest such drink available at any retailer, 7-Eleven eventually introduced larger sizes. In 1986, they introduced the 44-US-fluid-ounce (1,300 ml) Super Big Gulp, followed by the 64-US-fluid-ounce (1,900 ml) Double Gulp in 1989 (later reduced to 50-US-fluid-ounce (1,500 ml))...
They were more absurd in the 90's. You'd have the gas station 64oz reusable cups you could use to do unlimited refills for a dollar.
"Super Size" was a 90's thing as well, if I recall. It was basically an arms race of which company could provide the most ridiculously large portions of a cheap product like soda or fries.
Then the PR swung in the 00's due to the obesity epidemic and such stuff was silently rolled back. Likely for both PR and cost reasons. The 32oz drink stuck around though pretty much everywhere.
Oh yes, the 1990s was the height of massive fast food drinks. Wendy's had 32 oz "biggie" drinks and a 40+ oz "great biggie". McDonalds had "super size" tho I don't recall its volume. Most of those got renamed by the mid 00's and eventually downsized.
> I don't know what they put into pizza "dough" but it's not real flour.
That conspiracy doesn't make sense given that flour is probably the cheapest ingredient in a pizza besides water. You'd have a hard time finding something cheaper, not to mention hiding it (either from the ingredients list, or from your conspirators)
As someone who hates the government and the megacorps, I loathe statements like the OPs because there are so many legit and real reasons to hate shit before we come up with "KFC doesn't call themselves Kentucky Fried Chicken anymore because there isn't enough chicken in their product" type of conspiracy nonsense.
Also, based on the statement, you're buying shit pizza from trash restaurants/frozen garbage. That's why the crust is bad. Pizza is one of the cheapest things you can make, that's why when I worked in restaurants I always said if you can't make money selling pizza you need to get out of the industry.
In the 80-90's fried food was vilified and they wanted to start selling things beyond chicken. The old name carried prejudices the corporate overlords wanted to eliminate.
I have found it is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper to cook at home, even once you factor in the "lost" time.
The amount of time required to prepare incrementally larger batches increases at a sub-linear rate. The bigger your batch, the more food you get per unit of wall clock time. I try to prepare no less than 3 lbs of dry beans or 2 lbs of beef at a time. Anything less does actually feel like I'm wasting my energy.
I can make about 2000 calories for about $2-5 using staples like rice, beans, flour, salt, yeast, pepper, etc... Generally, spices are pretty cheap. Especially if you go to the bulk section instead of buying the little jars.
The thing I see stopping most people in poverty is lack of access to a kitchen. No oven, no stove, no pantry, etc... A hot plate and a microwave if they are lucky. Also the usual health issues that come from deep poverty like executive dysfunction, depression, and other chronic illnesses.
> stopping most people in poverty is lack of access to a kitchen. No oven, no stove, no pantry, etc... A hot plate and a microwave if they are lucky.
How poor are we talking here? The most nominally poor people I know live in depressed post-industrial towns in Slovakia and I don’t think I ever saw a kitchen without a stove and an oven.
I'm thinking more along the lines with high rent/high cost of living locations like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin. Where the only affordable places are rooms in single family housing. Places where affordable housing is illegal or severely restricted.
> I have found it is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper to cook at home, even once you factor in the "lost" time.
I remember years ago, when I worked at Subway, so often I'd be ringing up the customer, tell them their total, and they'd be like "It'd be cheaper to make it at home!"
I never for the life of me understood how this was some giant revelation for some people. Of course it's cheaper to eat at home. The value proposition for eating out, even at fast food, was always convenience, not cost.
Of course, the counter-argument is always something about how a load of bread is $X, all the veggies are $Y, etc, and it adds up to like 3x the cost of the Subway sandwich. But everyone making that counter just completely ignores the fact that all those ingredients will make at least 5 sandwiches.
In a lot of cases it's simple price fixing. If you want to be shocked, compare the prices of frozen potato products (like bagged hash browns and french fries) to the price of potatoes. There's like a 200% premium for simply cutting and flash freezing them. The machines have got to pay for themselves in an hour.
They do and companies already take advantage of them. But even a fast food restaurant has a ton of additional overhead that you won't have by cooking at home (or some you won't include in your price of your homecooked meal): rent, salaries, utilities, taxes, shrinkage, maintenance, etc. So even if they can get the ingredients cheaper they can't compete with you on some of these factors and must also include others like utilities in the cost of the finished product where you will generally ignore them when thinking about how much it costs to cook dinner.
It's not the case in many other places in the world. The ratio of cost for cooking vs. eating out is uniquely high in the US.
It's not an iron law, it's downstream of a hundred things, like property prices due to restrictive zoning, baumal's cost disease driving up wages, onerous regulation on food service, and a populace that seems to have collectively given up on seeking the best value for dollar.
Once you factor in rent, then cooking at home is maybe not cheaper. Rent and mortgages is the black hole sucking all money from the restaurants. Not ingredients or wages.
On the other hand, how high is the marginal rent of a kitchen at home? It's usually included whether you use it or not - and some parts like the fridge would take up space even if you exclusively ate out.
If you compare the cost of renting a room in a house, and renting an apartment it is a little easier to figure out. Usually room rentals will charge extra for kitchen access or just ban it outright.
Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation). Put differently, if more people had time and money to do what you do, you wouldn't bother to do it, either.
Making food from scratch is cheap. It also doesn't take much time unless you want it to. Choosing not to cook has become performative learned helplessness.
I was far more likely to cook from scratch when I was poor than when I was not. And honestly, the food was healthier too. Basic life skills.
I really want the "cooking is too expensive" crowd to show me where they're getting their cheap food. I would struggle to make a homemade burger cost as much as a McDonalds quarter pounder. Even if I used twice as much beef.
Of course there's also eating of bad, expensive food. But being pressed for time is a real thing for some people. And IMO more importantly, if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food?
Nobody says "if you want a really good office chair you have to build it yourself". Same for shoes, cars, bikes, a million things. You can do that, make your own bike for example, but to get up to par you need to spend vastly more time and money, it's basically using more resources to be quirky or make an experiment etc.
IMO the default expectation, demand, the thing we should organise to achieve, should be that what's available, what the market competes over, is good and gets better, regardless of the market. Not that it gets worse because the buyers get fleeced. Doubly so not food.
Because there are multiple competing axis for "good" as relates to food. There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.
What in my comment is that "because" supposed to connect to?
> if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food?
Nope, doesn't work.
> There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.
You could say this about anything, you can either have cheap, good, and, say, extremely light-weight office-chars: pick two. That's absolutely orthogonal to what I said, and still applies to making your own vs. buying one that was made a lot cheaper be economics of scale. That trade-off applies in either case, so your comment is a complete no-op.
Why are so many things cheaper and get ever cheaper, while things like food, housing, education, medicine don't? Why does productivity rise so much faster than wages? Because there are no adults you can even discuss this with without their uneasiness forcing them to blurt out something, anything. Because people in golden cages can't even sit with what is. That's a provocative claim, an invitation for me to be proven wrong, but at least it actually relates to proceeding and surrounding comments and isn't just something out of a farmer's calendar.
I mean, that's easy. The things that get dramatically cheaper tend to be manufactured, automatable, scalable, and globally tradable. the things that keep getting more expensive tend to depend on scarce land and human labor delivered locally. Shit.
The problem with food is that it is perishable which makes scale much harder to achieve without a lot of the product going to waste and thus negating the reduced costs. Preserved food you can heat up at home is quite cheap but personally I don't want to eat that every day.
The problem is I typically only want a single burger, but I have to buy the ingredients for four or more. To purchase all the ingredients to make a home made quarter pounder with cheese, I am spending around 40-50 USD. Sure, I could make five or six with those ingredients, but that is irrelevant if I only want one. And many of those ingredients are perishable. Unless I am eating several quarter pounders a week, I am saving money by getting a quarter pounder from Macca's when the mood strikes.
I consistently buy ground beef on sale for $5/pound. Looking at walmart.com right now, they are selling it for $6.44/pound. Maybe people think cooking is expensive because they, for some odd reason, are paying $5 for a half pound of ground beef.
And on Saturday, I bought a package of four 1/3 lb burger patties (ground chuck) for $7.99 and a package of burger buns for under $2 at a gas station. Kwik-Trip FTW.
That price depends a lot on where you live and shop.
Maybe stop shopping at Whole Foods, Market of Choice, New Seasons, etc.
At my local grocery store (Fred Meyer, a chain owned by Kroger), ground beef is as little as $5.33/lb. It only gets to $10/lb if you insist on buying the 93% lean, grass fed, organic beef.
> Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation).
It takes very little time to prepare and cook most simple meals - if you want to dress it and garnish it and execute a 1000 step recipe, that is of course on you. For example, you can have a steak and potato (loaded with cheese and sour cream) as good as anything you get in a restaurant in under ten minutes. It is rarely faster to go out to eat. That is of course taking as a given that people really are working more hours, which I am very skeptical of and which BLS data does not support.
I am sympathetic to people's arguments about cost and free time generally, but I think "cooking your own food" is mostly a victim of the increasingly sky-high value people place on convenience vs doing almost anything for themselves that constitutes "work" in their minds. It is definitely not true that money is the issue, as other commenters already mentioned.
I think a lot of it is depression and anxiety causing executive dysfunction. The claim about "Lack of Time" usually indicates that the person doesn't have the energy or wellbeing to engage in activities like cooking or cleaning. If there is one thing that poverty and financial instability do, they destroy your mental and physical health.
You would be correct. US BLS survey data consistently indicates that a majority of Americans cook at home and almost never eat out.
Affluent urban professionals, of which there are many on HN, may have their perception of the world influenced by living in a bubble of people that eat out several times a week. Until I saw the BLS data, I assumed more people eat out than actually do because almost everyone I know falls into this category. But having been poor once, I definitively know you can eat cheaply and well by cooking at home.
It's usually faster making a meal at home than ordering from a restaurant, if you are smart about it. And it's always cheaper and healthier as well. And tastier.
lol amen. I don't understand where this myth of it being expensive to do things yourself came from. It's not only cheaper but way way way cheaper. And that's comparing it to crap quality stuff. If you compare to what something of the same quality as you make would cost, then the difference is just ridiculous.
I think the myth comes from the upfront costs of cooking equipment and spices as well as expensive proteins like ground beef. If you cook with mostly starches like rice or potatoes and just some meat, there's no contest. The other thing that can make cooking expensive is buying too many different ingredients to make a fancy dish and having a bunch of leftover stuff that gets thrown out. But that's where soups come in.
I think most people don't know how to cook cheap stuff and don't even know where to start. It is a bit of a learned skill. You get a repertoire of cheap but delicious menu items over time. It used to be that our parents would hand them down like sacred family heirlooms on notecards in a greasy metal box. But our parents were way richer than us and they only kept the most delicious ones.
One big hit for me was having to create an entirely new set of recipes when I cut out meat from my diet. It got really hard because plant protein is way different from animal protein. The processed vegetarian stuff is insanely expensive too.
Many of those old recipes on the notecards relied on heavily processed, shelf-stable industrial ingredients from a century ago that few people would use today. The recipes were commonly disseminated by companies as a form of marketing for their product. We have unimaginably superior access to diverse and fresh ingredients today compared to many of the recipes that e.g. my older relatives used.
Modding those recipes to replace the dependency on heavily-processed ingredients with the fresh, less-processed comparables readily available today often produces good results, though it does take more time.
Archive has a bunch of older recipe books. This [1] is a collection just from the 50s which would be primo processed time (mass canning/etc just after WW2). I could not find a single recipe with anything like what you're describing.
That’s a limitation of your source. Several recipes that I’ve seen passed down from that era were like this. Many of those recipes have an origin that can be googled.
I am an accomplished cook and I have a lot of recipes passed down a century or more first-hand. Many have the property I described. I know many other people with similar family recipes.
Just because you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Most of the product types you're describing didn't meaningfully exist until the 50s (which is why I used that era) as WW2 greatly expanded production of crap food and subsequently led to a wider public introduction. So having family recipes using them from a century or more would be quite odd.
Beyond that, what do you think is more representative of recipes of the past? A selection of hundreds of recipe books with thousands of recipes, or the family recipes of yourself and some acquaintances?
There's a specific category of people who get weird about this on social media. Shorthand for it is "burrito taxi discourse". There's usually a long list of excuses, some of which may have validity, some of which are a bit stretched.
I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper.
Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.
I definitely don't agree with this part. Home cooking is often significantly better than restaurants. Not only are cooking and running a restaurant very different skill sets (and 'just hire a really good chef' isn't really viable for a typical restaurant), but you also have issues of scale. Creating a diverse menu that can be created, on demand, in a short period of time imposes significant limitations on what you can produce.
Another is that cheaping out on something in a dish at home can save you perhaps 60x over a month, but doing so at a restaurant can save you thousands of times that. So they tend to be using worse quality ingredients which end up being sold for much more because they're also needing to pay for labor, rent, electric, and much more - before they hopefully make some profit on the month. This is how you get things like fast food franchises typically being single digit profit margins enterprises in spite of selling large volumes of low quality food for relatively high prices.
The comparison between home cooking and high end restaurants is certainly much closer, but also not entirely one-way. So for instance one issue I have with restaurant food is that it tends to be excessively salted. This is largely because the more people consume salt, the more they need of it to experience the same 'flavor'. It's kind of like a drug in that regard. So when somebody who minimizes the amount of salt they consume goes to a high end restaurant, it can often tastes like freebasing pure salt. I'm sure to their average customer it tastes fine, but it's subjective, and it's also why something like 100,000 Americans die per year of salt driven disease. To put that into scale we're already approaching (if have not already exceeded) more Americans dying of salt, over the past decade, than COVID.
Scale does matter, though. The little thing that elevates restaurant (and especially "street food", for some reason) is usually garnishes. Small amounts of fresh ingredients are a big pain for home cooking because they require disproportionately more effort. Whereas the things that do do better at home tend to be long slow dishes that you don't get in restaurants because of the lead time.
It's certainly very easy to do better than chain fast food. And my opinion of a certain local cafe was diminished once I got a Costco card and recognized the muffins.
I suspect if the thing that elevates food for you is garnishes, then you're probably speaking of a way different class of food than the average person. But in any case, what sort of ingredients are you talking about? Typical garnishes are things like herbs and they take quite some time to go bad.
Totally, a huge swathe of things are better and cheaper when your make them yourself, you just need the time. Shame we've given up all our free time to work so we can buy worse alternatives.
For a lot of my friends it's not about time. They'll proclaim their lack of time to make a simple meal, doom scroll for hours then order take-away then doom scroll half and hour while waiting for it to come.
What about the rationalisations of those who cut corners and wine to make even more profit when they're already so rich it's become a health issue for them? How is it the sole responsibility of your friends to work around that?
The idea is basically that it's "just the way it is" that the food we can buy in supermarkets, that is made in factories, that GIGANTIC amounts of real estate and logistics and energy are devoted to, that is made cheaper than it would be otherwise (and that is true even if it was awesome quality and mega healthy -- it would be more expensive, but less expensive than doing it yourself, economics of scale etc.) sucks, is unhealthy, you "shouldn't eat that".
Just buy some veggies and do it yourself. It's not so hard to plant some tomatoes, either! Nevermind people in private jets doing airshows... I just can't with how lazy my friends are. It would take them 30 minutes max.
It's not that you're wrong, of course. Both "sides" matter, and you always should mostly focus on what you control. But at the same time, it's better to punch up than kick down or sideways.
> Shame we've given up all our free time to work so we can buy worse alternatives.
Not true on average. The average American spends 4-5 hours a day on personal screen time.
And those who complain about not having time to cook I'd bet dollars to donuts are pulling that average up, if my personal lived experience is anything to go by.
There is a case here in terms of two income households being the norm these days, but that's really about it. The average person today lives a life of far more comfort and convenience than even in the 90's.
Potentially as a side effect. A lot of ingredients are switched to cheaper, often more processed substitutes.
For example, vegtable oil instead of olive oil, fructose corn syrup instead of honey or sugar.
Beyond that chainging composition to reduce amount of expensive ingredients. Think Pesto Genovese which is originally Parmesan, Basil, pine nuts, etc. Instead of only pine nuts, you now include other nuts for texture and only add a smaller amount for flavour (and worse add flavoring so customers don't notice too quickly).
not to mention "Bac'n Bits" which my wife picked up as a salad topping which contains NO bacon, and is simply colored crispy soy bits with smoke flavor. Someone aught to arrest the manufacturer
Also in big letters "OLIVE OIL" with barely legible "mixed with 90% sunflower seed, canola and other oils"
Brother I don't know what to tell you. Chick'n, Bac'n, Be'ef etc. are well-known vegan susbtitutes for the pun'd meats. Most of them explicitly say they're vegan on the box. That's not shrinkflation, you just didn't read the package.
To be fair, "Bac'n Bits" have been made of soy for decades - IIRC, they have always been. That's not them being cheap - they were designed that way. You just didn't realize. A lot of brands are similar - not all are vegetarian or vegan, but many are.
If you see a bottle saying "OLIVE OIL" and its actually a mix of sunflower, canola, or other oils in small print that's a product illegal to be sold in the US. It has to be very clearly labeled its a mix.
If its labeled as olive oil it has to be just oil from olives. The "extra virgin" and related labels don't carry any real weight here in the US though. I do wish we'd enforce labeling standards on stuff like EVOO, maybe also require actual country of origin for that particular bottle instead of allowing them to list it may come from practically every olive oil producing country.
Please name and shame the product, and report it to the USDA.
If its a usual trick one should be able to find some usual examples. I've never encountered a bottle of oil in the US suggesting its olive oil when its really a blend. Maybe I've encountered a bottle that had a picture of an olive in the background along with other vegetables, but never something really trying to suggest its "olive oil". They almost always just have generic vegetables on them or soybeans or whatever. Can you share an example with me?
I do quite often, and have been for decades. Along with shopping at foreign/"world" grocery stores, higher end grocery stores, etc. Across several different US markets over the many years.
Once again, got any actual examples of this supposedly incredibly common thing?
yes literally heres from my local market. 20% olive oil yet the main oil is in very light (its even harder to see in real life with how the eye works at a store), and then in big letters OLIVE... yeah this is a great example!
....got anything more than a text description of the product that happens to leave off any actual descriptions? Got a brand name? A variety name? What store sold it? No? Huh weird.
Man they now make almost all olive oil from crude oil! Look, I've got a bottle here, says 100% PURE EXTRA ULTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL* and then you look at the fine print on this bottle and it says "LOL ACTUALLY 100% USED MOTOR OIL GOTCHA!!" This is how all the bottles at every supermarket in my unspecified city is like!
You're confused the "Violi Mediterranean Blend Italian Sunflower & Extra Virgin Olive Oil" isn't purely olive oil? Really?
To be honest though, I've never come across this. Apparently its sold at HEB.
Its also kind of crazy it took this many replies for someone to actually link a real product they're talking about.
Either way, I still feel like this isn't breaking my standard. Its pretty obvious from the packaging what it is. "I've never encountered a bottle of oil in the US suggesting its olive oil when its really a blend". Its not hiding its a blend at all. Its on the face of the bottle, announcing its a blend is in an even bigger font than "OLIVE OIL". The person I replied to said the fact it was a blend was hardly legible. It was immediately obvious to me this was a blend.
You can't be honestly claiming that this packaging isn't designed precisely to confuse people not looking to closely into thinking that this is olive oil.
I remember picking up something at the grocery store that featured a large "No High Fructose Corn Syrup" claim on the front. The ingredients on the back listed "corn syrup" which fulfilled the letter of the claim, but not the spirit I would say.
Corn syrup is fructose-free. What do you want them to put on the label? People avoid HFCS for the fructose in it. Corn syrup is glucose.
Corn syrup is one of the only plant-derived industrial-scale sweeteners that isn't substantially fructose. HFCS is made by adding fructose to it so it can be used as a substitute for high-fructose sweeteners like sugar, honey, fruit juice, maple syrup, etc.
is there any actual truth that real sugar is not as bad as HFCS? If I drink an american coke every day am I really worse off than if I have the cane sugar coke?
No. They're metabolically equivalent. "High fructose" corn syrup is "high" relative to normal corn syrup, not relative to sugar, some of the HFCS formulae in packaged food has less fructose than table sugar, and, most importantly, your body is a well-oiled machine at breaking down sucrose, which is cleaved enzymatically immediately upon it entering your gut; there's no material slowdown in digestion from eating sucrose.
(The key thing to remember is that sugar is bad for you; it's not that HFCS is good, but rather that cane sugar is just as harmful.)
Two fun additional notes:
* There's a video somewhere showing how cane sugar breaks down into fructose and glucose in bottled sodas anyways, and
* Perhaps unsurprisingly, taste testers can't reliably distinguish between HFCS and cane sugar formula Coke.
Yes, sugar breaks down to the same fructose and glucose proportion.
That takes months. Even longer in concentrated syrup form. Even longer in the one of two components that bottlers get to make the syrup.
A freshly bottled coke in a glass bottle still has the undivided sucrose and that is why it tastes more crisp. After a while, it separates and it doesn’t taste any better because it physically isn’t different.
A freshly bottled HFCS coke still tastes fresh in all other respects, but is essentially stale on day one as far as the sweetener goes.
But by far the best is a properly calibrated soda machine with fresh syrup— but it’s only really fresh if it is sucrose. Otherwise it’s basically stale before you even make it.
Chemistry doesn't support your hypothesis. Sucrose rapidly decomposes into glucose and fructose via acid-catalysis. Coke is very acidic.
The half-life of sucrose in coke under good storage conditions is ~2 weeks[0]. Modestly higher temperatures, such as during transport, reduces that to hours. The internet suggests that that coke is typically consumed 4-12 weeks after manufacturing, depending on the supply chain. Even in the most optimistic scenario, no more than 25% of the sucrose remains when you drink it. Realistically, it will round to 0%. Almost no one has drank a coke that still had sucrose in it.
The process is slower than enzymatic catalysis in the body (seconds to minutes) but still quite fast.
[0] I used an LLM to run the math but the result passes a cursory eyeball test.
Under typical conditions the half-life of sucrose in coke is hours to a couple weeks via acid catalysis. In the body the half-life is seconds to minutes via enzymatic catalysis.
The half-life of sucrose is greatly reduced by acidity and to a lesser extent temperature. It is stable for centuries in a neutral pH when kept cool but that describes almost nothing we do with sugar in foods.
Yeah, a big part of the flavor difference between Mexican Coke and American Coke really comes down to the extra sodium in the Mexican Coke variety.
You can get the US formula coke with cane sugar during Passover in markets with a high Jewish population. Taste it, it'll be practically the same as HFCS US Coke and not like Mexican Coke. Because, it has the same amount of salt as the US variety.
Ironically, the coca-cola in Mexico uses high fructose corn syrup. It's the Mexican coke they export to the US that has sugar - which breaks down to glucose and fructose in the presence of phosphoric acid anyway.
Anyway, the only thing Mexican about Mexican Coke is the "Medio Litro" on the bottle.
The bigger difference, imo, is that Coke just tastes better out of a glass bottle. Orifice size and shape makes a big difference in taste and mouthfeel.
I definitely agree that the container can make a big difference on how we can perceive beverages, and I don't doubt it's a part of the experience fans of Mexican coke enjoy even if they don't realize that's playing a role.
I remember watching a video (something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo, but probably not that exact one) where they did the analysis and determined that Mexican cane-sugar coke contains the exact same proportion of sugars as HFCS coke - and it's because of the chemistry of how the sugars break apart in the presence of acid in the liquid.
So in theory an extremely fresh mexican coke might be different, but in practice you're getting the same thing.
I don't think so. I've seen things that say fructose has worse effects than sucrose in terms of spiking your blood sugar or whatever but that's minor compared to the overall impact of any sugar. Sugar is sweet because we were once starving beasts and calories were good. Now it's a hazard. And corn syrup gets dumped into all kinds of processed foods in the US because of how cheap it is, and how much people like sweet stuff.
We have shaped our food culture in a way to maximize short term profit at the expense of making everyone fat and disabled longer term.
>I've seen things that say fructose has worse effects than sucrose in terms of spiking your blood sugar or whatever but that's minor compared to the overall impact of any sugar
That sounds pretty major. You can be not in the slightest bit obese and the blood sugar spikes will still be bad for your brain, your insulin regulation, etc as far as I understand it.
I'm unaware of any large scale studies on this topic. Both are pretty bad health-wise and should be avoided in regular large doses by anyone regardless.
I pointed it out because its often used instead of sugar for cost reasons.
Not really other than the micronutrient dimension which is not relevant in most commercial preparations. What matters most is the other stuff you're having it with. You want to have fiber _at the same time_ as refined carbs/any kind of sugar/jaggery/honey/palm sugar/... In a coke you're just getting sugar and water which is terrible.
This isn't true. Your body breaks sucrose into fructose and sucrose almost instantaneously; in fact, sucrose is so easy to break down that it happens in Coke bottles. Fructose is bad for you, but you're getting just as much of it from table sugar as you would from HFCS.
"breaks sucrose into fructose and glucose almost instantaneously" - I presume what you meant to write?
And that's absolutely true. I think it's easy to hate (more) on HFCS because it literally says "high fructose" in it, and thus easy to come to that conclusion.
it is not "pure fructose" - they have different levels but usually it is 50% fructose syrups. Lots of fruits have similar ratios to that too, fructose isn't the problem so much as the quantity of it being ingested, but high quantities are glucose or other sugars are also bad when they come in liquid or otherwise highly digestible and fast absorbing foods. Also sucrose, which is table sugar, is indeed also 50% fructose.
Fructose mixed with glucose, not sucrose (the same typo is in several comments here). Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose linked together.
When corn starch is processed, the produced syrup is nearly 100% glucose. Because fructose tastes sweeter, lots of corn syrup is further processed, converting much of the glucose into fructose, hence the name high fructose corn syrup.
Palm fat instead of butter in doughs/baked goods is what annoys me a lot recently. But in that case it probably isn't just purely about cheaper goods but also about expanding the market to include vegans similar to how a lot of meat products replace haram pork with turkey.
But it is large enough to sway companies considering that most non-vegan consumers don't care too much or at least don't look too closely. Yeah the potential market gains are not that big the expected losses are even smaller so companies see this as an easy win.
A lot of people feel like stuff tastes worse than it used to, too
That's obviously hard to measure because you can't do a blind taste test of a 20 year ago candy bar and one today, and people's tastes change as they get older. But worse ingredients making a worse flavor is possible too
Over here in the UK at the moment you can. They’ve recently made huge changes to a lot of chocolate products in the space of a year or two. Especially cadburys which is now just at the legal definition of chocolate over here. Any lower and they legally have to call it “chocolate flavoured” which has already recently happened to a bunch of classic lunchbox chocolate bars. So shit.
> From pretty much day one, the size of a @McDonalds beef patty has been 10:1 (10 patties per pound of beef). It still follows this standard today. Same size.
> There are no fillers, preservatives, organs, bones, or anything like that, just 100% pure USDA beef. The box doesn’t even need an ingredient label; it simply states 100% Beef.
Technology in the form of computers, cell phones, and AI have been getting cheaper and better. Access to information is another one but that requires agency to take advantage of and get the benefits. This could be personal health, starting/running your own business, using ai to help create ads for your business, etc.
Also "Access to information" is a funny one, most of the useful information is crowd sourced via direct sources like wikipedia and now indirect sources like LLM's regurgitating all human knowledge.
Everything a company is selling you is getting worse, one can only assume the same will happen with AI, as soon as possible otherwise the AI companies won't be able to payback on the investment.
whenever i see this i drives me away, i'd rather buy from a business that drew stick figure ads by hand. funniest thing i saw was an ai food ad and someone asked if the ai makes the food as well. the staff were actually miffed lol.
Saw AI food pics on most stands at a festival recently. Real uncanny valley horrors that tell you nothing about what you are actually going to get. Unfortunately, as with most enshittification, normies don't seem to care.
Nobody cares that their TV is cheaper when it now smashes ads in your face while using your bandwidth to serve botnets and sends a heartbeat even when offline. Everything that actually matters, like good healthy food or youth sports, is increasingly expensive or shrinkflated.
It's because of rent. Rent keeps going up and this gets passed on to all people who buy things, live, or work, but it rarely flows the other way - rentiers spend all their rent acquiring more rent, not on productive things. And so you have this constant leeching away from the real economy.
Agreed. It's not just a reduction in size, but a reduction in general quality. For example, my preferred NIVEA roll-on deodorant used to come in a glass bottle and now it comes in a plastic one.
I suspect shrinkflation has a lot to do with inflation. Companies degrade the quality of their products to preserve their margins which are being eaten up by inflation.
> It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
Hmm. I think it's just as easy to find products that haven't gotten worse or more expensive as it is to find ones that have. For every mars bar, there's a video game.
Video games are honestly a pretty bad example. 10-20 years ago, you'd buy your video game, and it was a complete item, that you owned and could play for as long as you didn't damage it. Once you were done with it, you could lend it to friends, or sell it and recoup a decent chunk of money for the next game you wanted.
Now with everything digital only, you don't even own your games, your ability to play it is at the whims of mega-corporations. You can't resell it to recoup money, or lend it to a friend. Most games start on day 1 as essentially a beta, with tons of huge updates required to get them in a decent state, loot boxes, microtransactions, live service games taking over the entire market share, RAMmagedden driving up console prices post-launch, etc etc etc etc.
They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.
> Video games are honestly a pretty bad example. 10-20 years ago, you'd buy your video game, and it was a complete item, that you owned and could play for as long as you didn't damage it. Once you were done with it, you could lend it to friends, or sell it and recoup a decent chunk of money for the next game you wanted.
As I said to another commenter, that applies to many of the games I buy today. OK, not quite all since I do buy some titles digitally, but that is my choice.
> They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.
And are much better in terms of accessibility, quality-of-life in general, scope, etc.
No you can't. Big studios don't make games with 2006 graphics and indies don't make the games you could get in 2006 except for the smaller scale ones.
Of course games are a cop out when discussing inflation in the first place because they have zero marginal cost to produce and the market has massively expanded - if their prices had kept up with inflation something would be VERY wrong.
Subjectively, video games did get both worse and more expensive over the last 20 years.
But putting that aside, the ratio isn't 1:1. I'd expect the ratio to be at least 20:1 - you can name at most 1 thing that got better/cheaper for every 20 things that got worse/more expensive.
I'd like to see your evidence for video games getting more expensive. Even if they were like-for-like (I'll make a case that the average video game is a far better product now than it was in the 90s), they are approximately the same absolute price today that they were 30-40 years ago, without adjusting for inflation.
That's the thing, the style of game release of the 90s is all but dead. Sure you can still find indy studios releasing in a 90s style, but you can't find the big players doing that. Now a lot of the big name games have switched to either a freemium model or a pay to play model.
You don't simply buy a game like Overwatch, you have to get a battle pass to keep playing. And you don't ultimately own overwatch, once blizzard is done with it, the game is over and you can no longer play it. Then there's the fact that to be competitive, these games often sell items and loot boxes. If you want to not always die, you end up needing to buy these perks.
That is a worst experience designed to milk money out of players as much as possible, more than what you'd be paying adjusted for inflation.
The entire genre of FPS is like this now. Unless you play the old games, you basically cannot get the old experience of setting up a server, maybe letting it be open to the public, and just playing a game with friends. Instead is a bunch of random dumb shit that you have to deal with.
What do you mean "and cheap"? Video games at the top range have very consistent pricing throughout history, about $80 adjusted for inflation.
That era in gaming had many releases that are still considered among the best games of all time, that pioneered trends that reshaped the whole industry. Almost every year had at least a couple such titles.
2004 GTA San Andreas, Half-Life 2
2005 God of War, Need For Speed: Most Wanted
2006: TES: Oblivion, Gears of War, Okami
2007: Call of Duty 4, Portal, Bioshock
2008: Dead Space, Left 4 Dead
2009: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2
2010: Read Dead Redemption, Bayonetta, Starcraft 2
The best of those games are either outside 2006-2012 or were console exclusives and not on PC, the strength of games before 2006 ( and Oblivion only just sneaks into the window ) and 2012 onwards only prove what drought there was in PC gaming in-between.
Red Dead Redemption still hasn't even come to PC yet, it's due out this year!
Okay, so I was the one who narrowed it to talking about PC games, but if we look at console gaming then it has got consistently cheaper.
Sonic & Knuckles cost around $60 in 1994 money, that's about $130 in today's money.
Games have got vastly cheaper, for decades they were consistently around $60 and it's only recently they've crept up.
Looking just at 2006-2012, 15 of the 20 games I listed are available for PC - and from what I remember at least 10 of them ran great on PCs of the time. So that drought wasn't particularly dry if you ask me.
But I'm not here to argue about 2006. I'm making a point that contemporary games are worse. I don't think it's even possible to make such a list for recent years. We get 1, at most 2 good games per year - and most of them are straight sequels with little to no innovation over their pre-pandemic predecessors. And not just on PC - across all platforms. Seriously, try to write down this list for the last 5 years and tell me it's not drastically worse than my list - and my list is of the allegedly worst period for gaming!
As for the prices. Most games were $50 until 2005 or so. A lot of PSX titles were $40. Then there's the trend of dicing up content into $10-20 DLCs in increasing quantities, meaning you're getting less of a game per purchace if you only buy the base version. A different kind of shrinkflation.
> they are approximately the same absolute price today that they were 30-40 years ago, without adjusting for inflation.
You used to get a lot of stuff in a game box that wasn't just the game though. Manuals were often very detailed, arguably works of art in their own right. Also the cost of producing and shipping games is way lower online than it was for physical copies. Companies all used to have to develop their own engines and tooling to build games, that cost is mostly just gone with Unity and Unreal now.
Last and definitely not least, there's way more competition in the gaming industry now, and that tends to drive prices down.
TV's for one, have become insanely cheap. You can get 4k TVs for like, nothing, especially after inflation adjustments from the 2010s. Bigger panels, brighter screens, too bad we started shoving stupid and annoying OSes and Ads in them.
Got a fairly expensive LG OLED and after 5 years it's developing clusters of dead pixels down one edge. And even if the hardware doesn't fail/degrade, the software is often enshittified (ads pushed to smart TVs)
True! But for me Myst was one of those super-hyped-up titles that failed to live up to its reputation. And I'm not a youngun, I started on NES/SNES! I'm not convinced GP isn't relying more on nostalgia than a real sampling of current titles.
fair point -- graybeard here (without the beard :))
I did stop gaming ~15 years ago, but I have tried to find good games for my (now teenage) kids, so I have tried to research new games even if I haven't played them myself. I haven't found anything on the level of Myst/Riven/Exile.
You know what else they don't make anymore? Good split/screen coop games, like Splinter Cell. Everything is online multiplayer, but no more being able to sit on a couch and play together (other than Nintendo games, racing games). Same for good ol' LAN games. And sure, it's convenient to just game from home, but there's nothing like everyone lugging their boxes over to your place and setting them up on the dining room table for a pizza-fueled all nighter :)
But honest! I do disagree that there aren't great games being made now, from Factorio to Animal Well. Is it possible it's harder for you to find worthwhile games in 2026 vs 1996? I probably wouldn't disagree, was a lot easier to follow the whole industry in the pages of EGM back then. :P
I think the implication is specifically for physical products. Video games aren't standardized sizes or materials and you don't somehow download 20% less content today than you did downloading the same game 5 or 10 years ago. (Ignoring some obvious outliers like games/content pulled due to licensing expirations - which are really stupid.)
> Video games aren't standardized sizes or materials and you don't somehow download 20% less content today than you did downloading the same game 5 or 10 years ago
20 years ago you bought a disk and the entire game was on there. 10 years ago you bought a disk and you have a massive day 1 patch to get the rest of the game. Today you buy a physical box with no actual disk in it, only a download code!
I'm exaggerating a little bit about today's situation but not by much...
That's not the same and that's what I'm trying to point out. A Mars bar is still a Mars bar. If you're paying more and/or getting less than you did X number of years ago, that is a simple apples to apples comparison. Since games are all, by nature, different, any comparison is apples to oranges. You can talk about specific features such as the existence of battle passes, microtransactions, loot boxes, etc., but every game's implementation is different.
If I pay $10 for a game and play it for 400hrs and pay $40 for another game and only play it for 50hrs, is one necessarily worse or better than the other by that metric? For example, I've played Outer Wilds significantly less than many other games that I've enjoyed far less, but I would still rank Outer Wilds as one of my all-time top favorite games. However that's very subjective to my experience. Others would disagree.
The point is, video games is a very bad point of comparison here and very obviously not the kind of product the OP is referring to.
A mars bar is probably not the same thing it was in 1986 either. Recipes get tweaked constantly to reduce ingredient cost (and usually marked with "new and improved recipe!!" Lol
Yes, that's my point exactly. It still bears the name of Mars bar but isn't the same. Whereas two different games do not share the same name, gameplay, story, grapgics, anything, and cannot be compared like this.
Video games of yore were actual games you could buy and play with friends. You had a physical copy and never had to renew a subscription, watch ads, or pay anything extra to unlock content. Most games didn't even have a separate launcher. Just run it and play. Updates, when they existed, were small. And no lootboxes, no gambling. They had hidden maps or levels, so it actually was fun to play the same game repeatedly.
I can't fathom why you'd pick video games as your example ffs.
> Video games of yore were actual games you could buy and play with friends. You had a physical copy and never had to renew a subscription, watch ads, or pay anything extra to unlock content. Most games didn't even have a separate launcher. Just run it and play. Updates, when they existed, were small.
That describes at least 90% of the games I play today.
I should have gone with any electrical item, tbh; that would probably have flown here without any dissent. But video games that are nowadays almost always one or two orders of magnitude 'better value' while being approximately half the price they were back in the nineties are still a legitimate example, I think.
> Video games of yore were actual games you could buy and play with friends.
While this is _true_, it's hardly a good-faith interpretation. The original Mario Bros was around $40 on release. Mostly sold as a bundle with the NES itself around $100.
That's $350 in today's money. Oddly around the same as the switch 1 on release ($299) + BOTW ($60)
Compare the "value" of NES + Mario Bros with Switch 1 + Breath of the Wild.
Yes Nintendo can take one of those away from you, that's despicable, but the "product" has shrunk in no way.
What alternate reality are you living in where the video games industry isn't a charred husk of what it was, just over a decade and a half ago?
What's it like to live in a world where competent AAA studios are still plentiful, and the legacy studios successfully passed down knowledge and ethos to new hires, so as to avoid becoming skinsuit versions of their past selves?
How is it, living in a world where several AAA blockbuster games are still being released annually, with none of them being remakes of decade-plus-old titles?
Is there any wisdom in how your reality's AAA video game industry kept the stride they built up to in the 2000s, into the 2010s, that you could share with us, so we can hopefully rebuild the smoldering crater of a AAA video game industry we have in our reality?
For me personally, the AAA game industry is entirely Nintendo, yes. Half the games I mentioned are cross-platform, though; I know they're not 'AAA', but I don't think this discussion needs to be limited purely to AAAs. And, as I mentioned, there are plenty more games that I could have included.
> For me personally, the AAA game industry is entirely Nintendo, yes.
There's nothing wrong with being a fan of one company, but pretending that going from a world where there were many high-quality AAA video games released each year from many different studios to what we have today, just because Nintendo is doing alright and you like Nintendo—when the topic at hand is specifically “the video games industry” as a whole—is simply asinine.
AAA studios were once the force driving technology and game design forward, regularly starting fresh new IPs that would go on to become cherished by fans. That simply does not happen anymore. What was the last fresh new Nintendo IP that went on to become a beloved recurring success—Splatoon (eleven years ago)?
Nintendo deserves plenty of credit for actively working against stagnation more than literally everyone else, but they are completely peerless in this regard. Everyone else ended up falling into a death spiral of churning out remakes and/or being absorbed into Microsoft and then stagnating until death. There is no longer a vibrant industry full of technical innovation and a genuine eye toward craftsmanship, quality, and generally making new fun things to play.
The indie game scene picked up some of the slack on the innovation front, to great success, yet almost none of the successful indie studios (off the top of my head, Facepunch is the only exception I can think of) have transmuted said success into building a studio with a culture focused on exploring the frontier of the medium. Hell, half of the big indie successes these days make their millions in Early Access, predicated upon the implied promise that their Early Access success will permit them to substantially build out the game beyond their Early Access offering, only to completely and utterly fail to do so in the end.
Anyone who thinks the video games industry is in a good place in 2026 is completely delusional and/or simply ignoring relatively recent history and pretending that things have always been as dire as they are today.
Also Mario Kart World was eighty bucks at launch dude (I had to look it up to be sure, but, yeah—I totally paid eighty US dollars for that game), and it's still selling for eighty bucks today, so, your entire position in this discussion is completely invalid on its face.
why does it have to be just about the AAA industry? Indy games are amazing now, and usually not sold at full price compared to console games, probably most of my favourite games of the past decade are indy devs or studios.
Indy devs are professionals too. Just because they aren't gargantuan megacorps doesn't make them amateurs. See: Expedition 33, made by formerly Ubisoft developers. Same people, different company, the devs themselves will still be around, regardless whether the AAA studio is still there.
“Professional” in this context refers to being paid for your work while you work on it, rather than making a game unpaid in hopes of receiving recompence from sales once said game is released. (“Indie publishers” are a thing, to be sure—but then that opens the whole can of worms of, are you “truly indie” if you have a publisher?)
Semantics aside, the point is, at one point in time, it was very good and healthy for the medium to have a vibrant AAA (and AA) video games industry. You're generally not going to see indies pushing the technical frontier forward, practically by definition. Things were never perfect, but they were better than they are today. Nowadays, it's basically impossible for someone to get a salaried position making video games.
Which is a bummer, because I grew up thinking that would be definitely where I was going to end up in terms of my career—having some salaried position somewhere, making games with people with different skillsets and areas of expertise than my own, learning from my seniors, having a sense of comradery with the people I worked with, becoming a better game developer. That ship has sadly sailed (or sunk)—it doesn't seem likely that we will have an industry like that again anytime soon.
The economics of software (including video games) are entirely different than candy bars or burgers as the marginal cost of each "unit" is effectively zero.
> Fair enough; pretend I said "a computer" instead.
That's a better example, though the "continually better, faster & cheaper" days for computers (and consumer electronics broadly) have recently been heavily disrupted by the current AI rush. Guess we'll find out how temporary or permanent this is.
everything is being min-maxed, have you noticed how flimsy and soft cereal boxes have become, and plastic-packaged goods having thinner plastic, and often replaceable lids have been replaced with single-use film (thinking specifically of hummus for this one).
Taking the time to count the ways shrinkflation is (fractionally) eroding quality of life would take an age.
You can google "CPI price change graph by type good" to find which things have undergone real inflation vs real deflation. TVs, phones, toys, clothes, furniture, cars.
Everyone likes to say Homer Simpson lived like a king. He had a car that was so bad it would be illegal to sell new today, no cell phone, no netflix, no Uber eats, clothes were so expensive it was worth the SAHM fix them, pizza or Chinese takeaway were a luxury, not a lot of furniture.
People today eat so well that broke 30 year olds will order haute cuisine and say it's basically the same price as home cooking (OK it's roughly as big a rip off as maccas in Australia but still ... home cooking can be dirt cheap).
What about the quarter pounder with cheese? Isn't that still a quarter pound? It would be illegal to sell any less in most places, not unless they change the name.
Nuggets are the same shape (boot, circle) but slightly smaller and much thinner now. If I had to estimate, probably 40% less pink sludge goes into each one.
Your income went up. Seriously. You're seeing interesting micros that target you and other high-income people, what's in your neighborhood is targeted. Most of America is drinking lower ABV beer from a case.
You think you are buying a TV but you are actually buying a billboard. With how scarce our attention is in the current era, advertisers are paying a pretty penny to shove an ad in your face via your TV's 'smart' features with the hope of getting a guaranteed conversion. If this strategy becomes even more lucrative I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future you can get a 4K top of the line "TV" for free.
TV shows on the other hand, have suffered extreme shrinkflation.
From 20+ episode seasons every year to maybe 8-10 episodes every 2-3 years.
Yeah, budgets/production values are higher. But characters and storytelling were often better in those old shows (Star Trek TNG/DS9, Lost, 24, Breaking Bad) where they could make those longer seasons every year for 5 or more years in a row. Simply far more screen time for character development.
Does your television not take 10 seconds to start, 2 seconds to respond to button inputs, request internet access, try to sell you things, and exfiltrate your personal data? If not: where are you getting your televisions?
Why? Because I don’t use it as a TV AND a set top box. I use it just as a TV that is connected to an AppleTV
And before when I was using the inbuilt smart TV, I had disabled various android services related to ads on my Sony TV, and run pi-hole that blocks ads.
Nope. Takes maybe 3-5 seconds to start from when I press any button on my Shield remote. HDMI CEC autoselects the input and everything reliably about 98% of the time. Once in a while (every couple months) I need to reboot my shield which is annoying. Faster than my old CRTs would warm up and get to full color output, degauss, etc. Better experience than some chunky expensive universal remote using IR blasters to coordinate it all.
Far better than anything I ran in the 90's or even 00's.
2025 model of the latest and greatest LG OLED. TV not connected to Internet, because who on HN would actually do that?
Even with your chosen set top box it's cheaper than ever before. It's on you if you choose to use the built-in Internet players. Those effectively come for free and you get what you pay for in that regard. No different than the 90's or 00's buying a cable box, VCR, or DVD player. Cheaper actually, since a Shield or Apple TV replaces all those devices into one quite relatively affordable device.
TVs overall are far better quality in terms of user experience. And I'm someone who has always had an overkill home theatre setup I spend far too much money on and upgrade far too often. It's only gotten better performance for dollar my entire life.
I suppose if you enjoy channel flipping it might be worse? But that's not something I really do much of, so hard to comment there.
I would bet real money that the usable life of a television now, even accounting for anything that required repair, is much higher than it used to be in the CRT era.
> Shrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.
Isn't capitalism great? The common pattern with everything seems to be large companies degrading size, quality, and features of products in user-hostile ways.
IMHO, we need pretty strict regulation specifying standard product sizes and minimum quality. It would kill shrinkflation and also make alternatives more comparable.
I believe it that US food is more expensive and lower quality.
I was just thinking about bread in the US specifically. When I go to the grocery store here the bread is relatively expensive, and the vast majority of it is full of chemical additives. It subjectively tastes like fake crap. It's mass produced in a factory and shipped across the country, and for all that it's not even cheap to buy.
There are one or two specialty bakeries in my city but they are far apart, and a bit expensive, though still so much better than what is available at the chain groceries. I'm sure there are lots of places in the country that don't have those local options at all. Feels like the basic unadulterated loaf of bread has in the US become more of a luxury item than a cheap staple.
In my limited European experience (Italy and France mostly), there were numerous small bakeries in every single neighborhood I visited. I could easily take a short walk and grab a baguette or loaf for 1-2 euro, far cheaper than in the US. The bread was delicious and fresh, locally made, free of all the questionable additives.
Then repeat that for other things like cheese, berries, cured meat... each available in Europe with so much less additive or alteration, so much less mass production, cheaper and more plentiful. My travel diet was excellent and felt both healthier and cheaper.
I'm not sure what lead to this cultural difference. Maybe centralization, car culture, difference in regulation, or something else entirely. But the end result is a bit depressing.
I shop at a major supermarket chain (in the U.S.). They have a variety of fancy breads without chemical additives, and cheap breads with a ton of chemical additives. Most of the bread is baked locally. Some of it is baked in the store itself.
When I was traveling in Europe, I stopped in stores to compare the foods and prices. I looked at the food labels, and the food there had just as many chemicals as the similarly priced items in the U.S. The expensive foods had fewer adulterants...but that's the same way expensive food in the U.S.
TLDR: expensive food is still decent everywhere. Cheap food is crap everywhere.
Or just don’t buy shitty mass produced chain products? The non-chain restaurants in my area are significantly better than 30 years ago. So are the breweries. Dive bars have gotten more sparse but the ones still around are better than ever. Food trucks are everywhere and good. Foods more expensive but you can still get a good restaurant cooked meal at 1/2 an hour’s minimum wage.
Like, if you buy garbage in a wrapper you should expect garbage. No one owes you a candy bar that never changes weight. The idea you would want to regulate that level of “what can people trade with each other” is absurd.
> Or just don’t buy shitty mass produced chain products?
You don't have a choice most of the time. You get to pick from the options the manufactures provide. And it's not like the average consumer has infinite time to sort through all the options on every item, as well as misleading manufacturer BS (like shrinkflation).
> The non-chain restaurants in my area are significantly better than 30 years ago. So are the breweries. Dive bars have gotten more sparse but the ones still around are better than ever. Food trucks are everywhere and good. Foods more expensive but you can still get a good restaurant cooked meal at 1/2 an hour’s minimum wage.
Sure, if you're in a fancy urban area you may have lots of options (the podcast cited New York as an example), but that's not true everywhere. It cited this hits hardest in rural areas.
Then there's the situation where you have 5 different options, but they all suck the same way because manufacturers are following the same incentives to screw their customers.
> No one owes you a candy bar that never changes weight. The idea you would want to regulate that level of “what can people trade with each other” is absurd.
I think I am owed a market structure that lets me make decisions with a reasonable amount of effort. Fixing the candy bar weight (for instance) means I can compare on price easily.
And regulating “what can people trade with each other” is not absurd, it happens all the time.
I never said regulation should never happen. But if I was literally trying to come up with a strawman for “market regulation bad” and using a caricature regulation as an example, candy bar weight would be a good contender.
That's true, real small scale food places are great.
I ordered a smash burger recently at a local outfit for the price of a big Mac. It was also a double but it was about twice the size of a big Mac and juicy and delicious, not that dry McDonald's processed crap.
I only eat McDonald's if there's really nothing else. Same with the other chains.
I'm a little surprised to see this perspective on a tech website, because technology has gotten wildly cheaper and better over the past 20 years, and there are a number of free, excellent services that just didn't exist 20 years ago.
Like, internet speeds are far faster than they used to be, cheap phones are much better than expensive phones were a decade ago, TVs used to be an expensive status symbol 15 years ago — and look at them now.
Video games basically didn't index with inflation for years, and it's easy to pick up great older games at cheap prices on sale.
YouTube is free and an incredible resource for learning, entertainment, and brainrot.
Google Maps provides free GPS services, which are incredibly valuable. You even have FreeVee-style streaming services that don't require a subscription.
Eh, it’s more that degrading size and quality is used to mask the effects of inflation. You can absolutely find high quality products, they’re just more expensive - to some extent, they’re a more realistic price.
Yes, capitalism is pretty great? The one complaint I have never really seen anyone seriously aim at capitalism before today is "capitalism is an inferior system for the delivery of hyperpalatable junk food".
Inflation is the most honest. Shrinkflation can be okay if the marketing changes.
But what I cannot stand is cutting quality of products and services. It happens in all sorts of ways. Thickeners and substitutions but also when a supermarket wastes your time asking you to scan N of the same SKU at rather than providing a qty button and even the staff can't help. But on the old school checkouts they do have a quantity field. It's different when they know their time will be wasted you see. And then there is the endless market segmentation from coupons, bundles, surveillance pricing and all sorts of mechanisms designed to muddy price signals and discriminate to shake down every customer to their limit.
How much of this recorded in consumer inflation I wonder? So much effort is put into scheming rather than innovation which seems highly inefficient if you think about productivity. Isn't late stage capitalism great.
You’d think competitive brands could launch to bring joy but everyone is so cash strapped that those brands lose since the mega corps price cheaper even if it’s worse/shrinkflated. Or they just get bought and rolled into the oligopoly!
