Shrinkflation: Public Enemy Number One
"Divert your eyes from the greater problems hiding behind the curtain as we bravely fight capitalism's evil gambit to put fewer Doritos in your Doritos bag!"
“Fewer Doritos in your bag. Fewer Oreos in your box. Less toilet paper on your roll. You aren’t imagining it—big corporations really are making you pay the same amount (sometimes more) for less. It’s called ‘shrinkflation,’ and we’ve got to crack down on it.”
“Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’nights; Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
-William Shakespeare from “Julius Caesar” (Act I, Scene II)
Every era has its challenges, and our 21st-century brand of America is no exception. Some may suggest that our southern border is as porous as a sieve. Our debt interest payments from our yawning deficit will soon become the second largest line item in our budget, exceeding that of our military and even Medicare. Crime is turning our once proud cities into relics from the felonious 1970s. Healthcare remains to be fixed. We are facing not one but three significant foreign policy challenges in the Ukraine, in the Taiwan Sea, and all over the Middle East. However, these are mere distractions.
Do not worry, fellow citizens. Joe Biden and the Democrats are donning their capes and tights to fly forth and save the day from…underfilled Doritos bags! Forget those other issues. The real challenge of our times is nefarious corporate rogues stuffing food containers only three-quarters full (the knaves!). It is scandalous.
According to Eva Rothenberg, writing for CNN Business,
“President Joe Biden does not want corporate greed to eat into your Super Bowl snack spread. In a video posted Sunday to X, formerly known as Twitter, the president called on companies to put a stop to ‘shrinkflation.’ ‘When buying snacks for the game, you might have noticed one thing: Sports drink bottles are smaller, a bag of chips has fewer chips, but they’re still charging you just as much,’ he said. Shrinkflation is a widespread practice where businesses offer fewer products without reducing prices accordingly. It is a common cost-saving tactic during periods of inflationary pressure.”
Much has been made of President Biden’s current memory challenges, including the inability to remember when he was Vice President. But really, what is this compared to Joe remembering a halcyon time when that box of Cheerios was packed full with oaty goodness.
Whether you imagine Biden’s heroic visage to look more like George Reeve’s dad-bod version of Superman than the Adonis-like Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel, it is irrelevant. He is fighting the forces of evil on our behalf.
Though Biden cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound (more like shuffling down a snack aisle), he can tell you that Chuck Norris is the only man who can eat just one Lay, which is the amount in the bag of which we may soon face if the capitalist thugs are not thwarted. We should keep such quibbles as Biden’s suggesting he has recently talked with men who were dead in 1996 from distracting from the import of this issue. After all, Joe Biden saves us from the horrendous toil of picking up the box and shaking it. Alternatively, even having to check its weight is backbreaking drudgery. When John F. Kennedy talked about Americans bearing any burden, he could not have meant something this burdensome.
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Moreover, in a superhero team-up, Joe is joined in this critical endeavor by Elizabeth Warren (plug in a Native American superheroine) and Bernie Sanders (The Red Scourge? the Socialist Spider-Man?), a progressive dynamic duo. Our only question is whether there is too much evil to fight. After all, those members of a new Legion of Doom are bent on giving us gas ranges, enabling us to consume meat products, and allowing us to choose our own cars, even our own tires! (Does their villainy know no bounds?) With the progressives, you need not carry the worrisome burden of making your own decisions. They will gladly remove that onerous activity from your weary shoulders.
There exists a calumny that because the Democrats’ spending helped create inflation, this is actually their fault. Writing in Reason Magazine, the villainous Christian Britschgi writes,
“Another word for shrinkflation is an obscure concept economists call ‘inflation’—where general price increases erode the purchasing power of consumers’ dollars. Inflation can appear when the price of a same-sized bag of chips increases and when the size of a same-priced bag of chips decreases. Both phenomena are still just the per-unit cost of a good increasing. Warren’s rant about shrinking Oreo packages is just the senator’s way of adding a conspiratorial gloss to the painfully obvious effects of decades-high inflation the country’s lived through during and after the pandemic.”
Do not listen to these lies perpetrated by vile corporate kingpins, even if most of them now vote for the very people condemning them. The progressives are our heroes, and you are there to be saved, mainly from your own inadequacy in running your life. Know your lane, people!
There is a foolish notion among conservatives that the government is not there to help but instead accrue power to those running the government. Some suggest a reckless and rash idea that an individual would make the best decisions for their lives and that of their families. This is a self-deluded belief that the real hero is in the mirror, not in Washington, D.C. Please do not buy into this false notion any more than buying that woefully inadequate box of Triscuits. The concept of self-governance is something beamed into your head by those depraved ingrates working for places like the Cato Institute or even this erroneously named Freemen News-Letter. It is for true heroes like Biden, Sanders, and Warren to grant the freedoms they deem worthy, even if that means removing every under-filled package of Cheetos and Funyuns from the supermarket.
AD Tippet is the founder and Publisher of the Conservative Historian. He has conducted extensive research in Political, Religious, Social, and Educational history across all eras and geographies. He has been writing and podcasting for over 12 years. In 2020, he published his first book, The Conservative Historian. He has degrees in history, education, and an MBA. @BelAves
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Thank you for a wonderfully cutting article. Nothing exposes idiocy better than sarcastic mockery. Alas..."Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true." - Julius Caesar
“ After all, those members of a new Legion of Doom are bent on giving us gas ranges, enabling us to consume meat products, and allowing us to choose our own cars, even our own tires!”
They even make us pick between 13 different kinds of deodorant…!