That’s been going on forever too, but at least my hand-wavey perspective is that whereas I might have thought in the past “huh, I sense my Cadbury’s bar is possibly 2% lower quality than 2 years ago :shrug:”, now it’s more like “huh, I can’t be the only one who’s had to stop buying this crap which was previously an ace product”.
I suppose both these forms of inflation are down to consumer buying power being weakened, and posit that nowadays it’s due to the “stock price being the product” - to lean on a reference to Silicon Valley’s Action Jack :)
Just look at stereo and AV equipment and the absolute plague of "rebadging." Brands that spend decades building customer loyalty went under, sold out their name and logo to some random asshole in China (or sometimes Europe), and that asshole then turns around and slaps the name on some generic Chinese crap which, if you dig a little, can also be bought with any number of other fake names plastered on it (or name-free, on Aliexpress.)
I know it's naive to immediately cry "there oughta be a law!" but in this case, specifically and more broadly, maybe there really oughta. If a company is wearing the peeled skin of another company Silence of the Lambs style, isn't that fundamentally deceitful (and thus fraudulent) advertising? If the bread or the peanut butter you've always bought is suddenly juuust a little smaller, shouldn't there be big, bright labeling required to make that clear, rather than a tiny weight or volume number no one is going to notice? If the clothes you always re-buy have suddenly changed materials and manufacturiing process, maybe they should be required to tell you that (and if you think figuring out what something is ACTUALLY made of before you buy it is easy, you've never tried to buy t-shirts on Amazon).
The reality is inflation is a thing, along with greed and a number of other supply chain issues hitting consumer products now. But I'd rather face the problem head-on instead of having to figure out what subtle con I'm being targeted for every time I try to buy toilet paper.
