I assume you mean the quality is quietly reduced without notifying the consumer? I’ve heard Cheapflation and Skimpflation.
“Cheapflation” sounds exactly like what I was thinking of. https://www.brusselstimes.com/1021212/not-so-fishy-fish-sticks-what-is-cheapflation-and-what-to-pay-attention-to
In Albert Heijn’s fish sticks, the fish content dropped from 75% to 55%.
Eeewwww
Enshittification
That’s what I originally thought, but I’ve only seen that term for tech stuff. Wikipedia describes it as “a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality”.
That’s a much broader term.
General enshittification, which is a consequence of declining Capitalism and the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall.
To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…
- Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
- Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
- Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.
Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.
Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.
Correct, because the “traditional” definition you outlined with the 3 points is ultimately the same process with the same mechanics and same vectors of force.
The reason I ask, is I noticed that Naked brand Strawberry Banana drinks now taste like regular juice, instead of having a thick smoothie taste. They used to advertise that each small bottle contained 22 strawberries, also listing the primary ingredient as strawberry puree. They now say each bottle is 6 and 3/4 strawberries, with the primary ingredient being apple juice. Strawberry puree is now listed as the 3rd ingredient.
Is there a term for when a manufacturer changes ingredients so drastically that it just ruins the original product? I’ve heard “enshitification” before, but always associated that with tech.
In before someone says Naked is all sugar and isn’t worth drinking in the first place.
Its still referred to as shrinkflation as i have seen it used. Putting filler material is just hiding the shrinkage, but the motivators and the result is the same
Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.
Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of
Right, by design. But when your are talking about the phenomenon casually, because the purpose and result is the same, shrinkflation seems to suffice. Are you asking for the name of the phenomena in the context of a detailed study? For that i am not sure it has a term it’s own.
I think it’s different enough from shrinkflation that it needs its own name. My gripe specifically was with Naked Juice, where if it was just being sold in a smaller bottle, I would buy more. But the recipe has actually changed to a point where I don’t want to drink it at all now, because it’s just not the same.
From an article linked above, my emphasis added, this is different because consumers are less able to protect themselves from it by being informed:
“We have long observed shrinkflation and bad value for money maxi packs,” Laura Clays, spokesperson for consumer protection organisation Test Achats, told The Brussels Times. “However, these tactics were mainly dubious from a financial point of view. This is still unacceptable, but consumers were able to protect themselves by keeping an eye on the price per unit.”
She stressed that in the case of “cheapflation”, the consumer is left more or less powerless. “This tactic is really about what people are ingesting, which is even more sneaky. While this will likely not have major health effects, eating less fishy fish sticks is definitely not a healthier meal option, so that’s not ideal.”
Shrinkflation is smaller quantities
Yes
and/or higher prices.
No. That’s just normal inflation.
Strictly speaking this is a subset of what the food industry calls reformulation. They’ll also reformulate a product for other reasons (eg to reduce sugar/fat/salt or add a vitamin so they can make a health claim, tweak the flavour if it isn’t performing well, etc) but reducing materials and manufacturing costs is a big part of it. Maybe we can coin the term “deformulation”.
That’s just regular deflation.
“shrinkflation” was a term which tried top capture the size instead of price. But if you want to stay within the price semantics, then your good old deflation, stagflation, inflation will do just fine.
I think when the op said “cheaper” they meant the quality of the product is lowered, not that the price is lowered (I also thought this is what they meant at first and was very confused)
Yeah you’re right. I stuck to the old askreddit rule of not adding clarifying text and put it in my comment instead. That kind of gets buried though. My bad.
Not sure if it need a specific term for that but watered-down seems to be the one being used for ages.
Yeah. I was having trouble finding exactly what I was looking for by googling “Naked Juice watered-down”. I did find something else that suggested specifically what I was seeing with Naked Juice described as Applejuiceification. But that doesn’t seem as versatile to describe other food products.
“Great news taste”
Or
“New and improved”
“Hey boss, we took the fish out of our fish sticks like you asked.”
“Great job, Johnson. Slap a “Great new taste” sticker on it and call it a day.”
I’d argue that this qualifies as enshittification.
Oh… you mean cheaper as in shittier not less expensive.
I don’t know of a name for it in general, but Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification.
Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality.
Haha I originally planned on writing “shittier” in the title, but then read it as “shit tier” and backed it out.
