It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment when the continuous chipping away of nice things began. I think you could make a case that Robert Crandall is the poster boy for the movement – which you could call shrinkflation, or enshittification, or something else, as you prefer – because of what he did as American Airlines CEO in 1987.
Crandall realised that removing one olive from each salad served to passengers would make no huge difference to any individual flyer (lots of them didn’t eat the olives anyway) but, added up over a year, because American Airlines served so many salads, it would save the corporation $40,000 – around three times that in today’s money.
Nearly 40 years on, shrinkflation or skimpflation are still in full flow. In 2024, consumer association Which? found that supermarkets were prime offenders: a box of PG Tips had recently gone from 180 to 140 teabags, while beef content in a Tesco lasagne had fallen from 23% to 19%. Still, at least it’s no longer horse.
Shrinkflation has parallels in what military analysts call salami tactics. You have a metaphorical salami. It’s yours and intact. Very nice too. You wouldn’t tolerate anyone stealing it, for sure. But along comes, say, Russia, and flies some drones over your border. What are you going to do about it? Not a lot. Slice Perhaps they hang some ships around above your internet cables, because how are you seriously going to react? Slice They make cyber attacks on your infrastructure. Slice They poison people on your own soil. Slice Before you know it, you have rather less agency over your salami than you did, and you have done effectively nothing in response.
Recently it was reported that in 2022 the Chinese planted a bug in the prime minister’s car. What are we going to do, deport all Jaecoos? And so it goes in normal life too. Salami tactics are the reason why British Airways now considers two Hobnobs ‘a snack’ on a pan-European flight and a Toffee Crisp can no longer be called a chocolate bar because there’s not enough chocolate in it.
If you were being cynical, you’d say there were parallels in policing and surveillance, governmental or corporate. My local hospital charges £2 for overnight parking. If you forget this, as I did at 3am after spending five hours in A&E with a child, the car park operator Parkingeye will send you a bill for £100. I find it impossible to despise these people enough.
Then there’s the changing climate, which means you can less easily have the nice things you want, like a cheap flight to the Med, affordable home heating or a petrol-engined hot hatchback.
Unless you’re wealthy, in which case nice things are still available and salami tactics don’t apply. And most of us don’t mind that at all, because we’re aspirational. Perhaps one day, if we work hard or our numbers come up, we might have a nice thing too.
Maybe a Ferrari. But dear me, *Slice* not one of those. I am talking, of course, about the Luce, Maranello’s upcoming electric five-seater.
