Beware of 'shrinkflation,' inflation's devious cousin
I've been shopping on Instacart a lot during the pandemic and I've noticed a related phenomenon: packaging designed to make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos. It's not necessarily a new thing, but the online photo aspect is somewhat novel because you don't get to see the product in context.<p>For example, a jar of Jalapenos, product photo: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/mprWr6R.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/mprWr6R.jpg</a><p>In reality, the jar's cross-section isn't circular as it appears, it's an ellipse/oval: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/dXDUOR9.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/dXDUOR9.png</a><p>Only the first photo was included in the item listing. When the groceries were delivered and I pulled out the jar, I was so surprised by the odd football-like shape that I couldn’t stop laughing for a few minutes at how well they’d fooled me.<p>Another common thing to see is familiar product packaging that is just “scaled down”. Everything about the packaging looks the same or very similar, but smaller - especially fonts. This deceives the eye into believing the product is much larger. I recently fell for this when shopping for some conditioner. The packaging is not exactly the same but close enough to fool me at a glance:<p>What I bought: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/MdAuhS0.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/MdAuhS0.png</a><p>What I expected: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/MGxdD0d.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/MGxdD0d.png</a><p>I'm inclined the believe this is on purpose because in real life, the fonts are way too small to read comfortably. If not trying to mislead, I would expect the packaging to be designed to be legible, right?<p>It's especially frustrating because I usually would've just paid more for the larger size.