An unchanged sticker price doesn’t mean a product actually costs the same as it did the last time you were at the store.
Consumers are noticing a rise in shrinkflation, which the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) defines as when the quantity of a product decreases without an equal drop in price.
For a recent report, requested by the U.S. Senate, the GAO examined 2019-2024 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to identify trends in and review other aspects of shrinkflation, also called “downsizing.”
The GAO reviewed a variety of data — including the frequency of product size changes and existing studies on consumer behavior — and interviewed government and industry officials as well as academics.
The report notes that between 2019 and 2024, consumer prices increased by 34.5%.
Shrinkflation accounted for less than one-tenth of one percentage point of that markup, but not necessarily because the practice is scarce.
Items susceptible to shrinkflation make up a small portion of the products whose prices the government tracks in order to measure inflation. It’s a lot harder to downsize an orange than a bag of chips.
The GAO looked at seven product categories. Those most affected by shrinkflation are:
- Paper towels: 38.6% of all sales (measured in dollars) were impacted by downsizing in 2021-2023
- Toilet paper: 10.7%
- Cereal: 8.56%
- Coffee: 6.44%
- Laundry detergent: 3.44%
The other two categories were toothpaste (2.3%) and pain relievers (0.5%).
To put this another way, downsized paper towels, for example, made up 38.6% of all paper towel sales by dollar value. That shows that downsized paper towels were more widely purchased than, say, downsized pain relievers, the GAO says.
That may come as no surprise to eagle-eyed shoppers. Some reported that paper towels and toilet paper were among the items that even Costco downsized in recent years. And a separate analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that household paper products were most affected by downsizing between January 2019 and October 2023, as we detailed in “10 Types of Groceries Hit Hardest by Shrinkflation.”
The average per-unit price increase for downsized paper towels was the smallest among the seven product categories that the GAO examined, however, at 11.6%.
The per-unit price increase that resulted from shrinkflation of coffee averaged 32.4% — giving those beans the steepest such jump among the seven categories.
Still, consumers are less responsive to shrinkflation than to equivalent price increases. The former has less of an effect on their purchasing behavior.
According to the GAO, this “could stem from lack of awareness of subtle packaging changes, infrequent purchases, or strong consumer preferences for certain products and brands.”
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