A lot of angry Canadians are stalking grocery store aisles, says survey

There are a lot of angry shoppers wandering the aisles of Canada’s grocery stores, turned off by shrinkflation and brands that they think are unfairly using inflation to justify price increases , according to a new survey by marketing company UAB Omnisend.

Omnisend said 72 per cent of respondents said shrinkflation — the practice of reducing the size of a product but charging the same price — was especially evident in groceries, while 92 per cent said they had noticed instances of shrinkflation.

“Consumers understand that costs change, but they want those changes to make sense,” Marty Bauer, an e-commerce expert at Omnisend, said in the report. “Shrinkflation creates the opposite impression: that a company is hoping customers will pay the same and notice less. In many cases, it can definitely feel like an insult.”

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Almost 90 per cent of respondents said they think brands are using inflation as a crutch to “unnecessarily” hike prices , changing how they view products they used to trust and causing around a third to stop buying go-to names.

Shrinkflation reared its head during the worst of the recent inflation crisis when Canada’s consumer price index accelerated to 8.1 per cent in mid-2022, forcing the Bank of Canada to hike interest rates .

Retail analyst Bruce Winder said consumer packaged goods companies used shrinkflation to try to protect margins and price points for their products.

“I think (shrinkflation) is happening a little less,” he said. “A lot of the companies that did it have been bitten … because they’ve seen volumes drop off, probably because they’ve seen trust go down.”