Shrinking a product while keeping its price strikes consumers as more unfair than raising the price by the same amount per unit, according to five preregistered experiments.
Ioannis Evangelidis reported the results in “Shrinkflation Aversion: When and Why Product Size Decreases Are Seen as More Unfair than Equivalent Price Increases”, published in Marketing Science in January 2024.
Same price per unit, different verdict
As living costs rose, many firms raised their prices directly. Others downsized, cutting the size or quantity of a product without changing its price.
Evangelidis compared how people judge the two when the price per unit of product is held constant, so that the shopper pays the same either way.
Across the experiments, the vast majority of people judged price increases made in response to cost increases as fair. For product downsizing, that pattern was weakened or even reversed.
As a result, the share of consumers who saw downsizing as unfair was larger than the share who saw an equivalent price increase as unfair. Evangelidis calls this “shrinkflation aversion.”
It comes down to feeling deceived
The effect is driven mainly by consumers’ belief that downsizing, unlike a price increase, is a deceptive practice.
Two factors moderate it: how transparent the product change is, and whether the firm’s costs have actually gone up.
For companies weighing the quieter option, that makes a smaller pack a fairness risk on two counts: shoppers notice the hidden change, and they want to see a real cost increase behind it.
Study Details:
- Title: Frontiers: Shrinkflation Aversion: When and Why Product Size Decreases Are Seen as More Unfair than Equivalent Price Increases
- Authors: Ioannis Evangelidis
- Journal: Marketing Science
- Publication Date: January 2024
- DOI: 10.1287/mksc.2023.0269