Shrinkflation vs. Skimpflation: The Difference, in One Candy Fight

Brad Reese threw away a whole bag of candy this Valentine's Day. Not because it was stale. Because, in his view, it wasn't real Reese's anymore, and he happens to be the grandson of the man who invented it.

That grievance turned into a public campaign against The Hershey Company and, more usefully for everyone else, a clean real-world example of a distinction economists have spent years trying to get people to notice: shrinkflation and skimpflation are not the same tactic, even though they get lumped together constantly.

What's the actual difference between shrinkflation and skimpflation?

Shrinkflation is the familiar one: the price stays the same, but the package gets smaller. A 16-ounce bag becomes 14 ounces; the chip count in a bag quietly drops. Skimpflation is different in kind, not just degree: the price stays the same and the amount stays the same, but the ingredients, materials, or service behind it get cheaper. A hotel that stops cleaning rooms daily, a store that replaces cashiers with self-checkout, a candy bar that swaps real chocolate for something described more vaguely on the label. All skimpflation.

The term itself is only a few years old. NPR's Greg Rosalsky coined "skimpflation" in October 2021 to describe companies paying the same or more for goods and services that simply weren't as good as they used to be. It stuck, and got picked up by, among others, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Why did a candy heir go after Hershey?

Brad Reese is the grandson of H.B. Reese, who invented Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in 1928. His family sold the company to Hershey back in 1963, but the name is still his. When he bought a bag of Reese's Mini Hearts last month, he found they weren't made with the classic milk chocolate and peanut butter the brand is built on. The label instead described "chocolate candy" and "peanut butter creme."

It was not edible, Reese told the Associated Press. You have to understand. I used to eat a Reese's product every day. This is very devastating for me.

He published an open letter to a Hershey executive, writing that his grandfather built Reese's on a simple, enduring architecture: milk chocolate + peanut butter, and that the brand's identity was being rewritten, not by storytellers, but by formulation decisions that replace milk chocolate with compound coatings and peanut butter with peanut-butter-style crèmes across multiple Reese's products.

Federal law actually backs up his complaint in a narrow, technical way: to be labeled "milk chocolate," a product must contain at least 10% chocolate liquor under federal regulation. A New York Times investigation found Hershey had quietly dropped the words "milk chocolate" from packaging on Almond Joy, Mr. Goodbar and Rolo, replacing them with "chocolate candy," language that no longer has to meet that bar. Hershey's statement to NPR didn't dispute the ingredient changes, framing them instead as ordinary product evolution: As we've grown and expanded the Reese's product line, we make product recipe adjustments that allow us to make new shapes, sizes and innovations that Reese's fans have come to love and ask for.

Is skimpflation actually getting worse, or just more visible?

The chocolate industry has a real cost story behind the reformulations. About 70% of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa, where drought and heavy rainfall (which some researchers tie to climate change) disrupted supply and helped push cocoa prices to record highs in late 2024. Tariffs added more pressure until the administration exempted cocoa from them last November. Since May 2025, cocoa prices have fallen almost 80%, but the candy already on shelves reflects formulation decisions locked in months or years earlier, back when input costs were near their peak.

Beyond candy, the pattern is broader and, unlike shrinkflation, hard to measure with a scale. Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative and someone who has testified before Congress on these tactics, found in a 2024 study that shrinkflation accounted for as much as 10% of total inflation in categories like paper towels, toilet paper and certain snacks. Skimpflation resists that kind of tally because it's about quality, not quantity, but Owens argues it can matter more, not less: often when we're seeing reformulations and a move to cheaper products, these are also more processed products, and those have real health implications for Americans who are consuming these items.

None of this is limited to snack aisles. Hotels that quietly stopped daily housekeeping, restaurants running with fewer servers, retailers down to one open register, airlines charging for what used to be free. It's the same underlying trade, spotted across a dozen unrelated industries by different people for different reasons. Reese's fight with Hershey just happens to have a famous name attached and a label that makes the swap legally provable, which is more than most skimpflation ever gets.

The federal government already requires companies to disclose ingredients, which is exactly how a Times reporter and an aggrieved grandson could each independently spot the same change. The information is usually sitting right there on the label. The trick, and the reason skimpflation works as a business strategy at all, is that almost nobody stops to read it, the same way most cardholders never notice when a late fee quietly changes by federal rule rather than by anything printed on their statement.