How shrinkflation is affecting your shopping habits
Search TikTok for videos of people walking into a grocery store to see exactly how much $100 buys now. The results are staggering, mostly because it buys so little. These videos rack up millions of views given that grocery shopping has quietly become something people feel compelled to document, since the math genuinely stopped adding up the way it used to.
Financial analysts tracking this exact shift have found the gap between price and quantity widening across nearly every aisle in the store.
The Doritos math that broke the internet
$4.79. That was a 15.5-ounce bag in 2021. Jumped to $5.99 by 2022, same size. Price held through 2023, but the bag shrank to 14.5 ounces. By 2026, a 14.4-ounce bag now costs $6.69. Less product. Considerably more money. Tracked step by step over five years.
Five chips, one very viral reaction
A TikTok user opened a snack-size bag of Doritos on camera. Found five chips inside. Total. “Five chips!” he yelled, holding up five fingers in genuine disbelief. The clip pulled in over 670 comments from equally frustrated shoppers, one writing that two handfuls out of a $6 bag felt maddening.
The mac and cheese conspiracy
A TikToker who goes by @chickpeanoodles built an entire video around one box of Aldi mac and cheese, measuring it out cup by cup to test her own theory. “I’ve had a theory for a while now that food companies are ripping us off so bad by lying about the amount of servings and serving sizes in groceries,” she told her audience, before demonstrating that a box claiming three one-cup servings barely produced two. The video pulled in over 2.2 million views, and one commenter’s reaction summed up the mood: “This should be a class action lawsuit.”
Fast food isn’t immune either
Subway’s foot-longs measure closer to five inches in some viral comparisons. McDonald’s Big Macs and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches look noticeably smaller than they did a few years ago. Burger King’s Whopper Jr. has shrunk to the point online commenters joke it resembles a slider more than an actual sandwich.
The 2025 shrinkflation wave nobody saw coming back
Just when manufacturers seemed to have paused, a fresh round of downsizing showed up. Simply Orange dropped from 52 ounces to 46. Crystal Light went from six packets per box to four. Bounty’s triple rolls quietly lost 12 sheets each. Ruffles shrank from nine ounces to eight and a half, the bag looking suspiciously unchanged on the shelf the whole time.
Paper products took an outsized hit
Household paper goods rank among the hardest-hit categories overall. About 60% of the paper items one analysis tracked had shrunk in sheet count since the pandemic, the highest rate of any category studied.
The bottom line
None of this is imagined, and it’s exactly why those $100 grocery haul videos keep going viral. The receipt tells one story. The bag in hand, five chips or otherwise, tells a considerably more honest one.
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