The Industrialization of Disappointment 😥

Pick up a bottle of Tide that says 64 loads on the front.

In 2014, a bottle that said 64 loads held 100 ounces.

Then it held 92. In 2024,

it dropped to 84. In October of 2025,

it dropped again to 80 ounces.

The front of the bottle said 64 loads through every one of those cuts.

And the cap, the little plastic cup with the

fill lines molded into the side of it stayed exactly the same.

So how do you get 64 loads out of 80 ounces with a

cap built for 100? The company tells you,

it's printed on the back label now,

actually, and I'm going to read it to you word for word.

Fill the cap 80% of the way up the line.

Think about what a fill line's for.

It's the one measuring tool the company actually hands you.

You don't

own a graduated cylinder, you're standing at the washer at six in the morning,

and the line is how you know you use the right amount.

And when the bottle shrank, the answer was to leave the line where it

was and print instructions telling you the line is wrong.

Eyeball 80% of the line inside of a blue cup in a dim basement.

Good luck. The obvious explanation is inflation.

Everything got more expensive.

Companies passed it along, and a smaller bottle is a gentler way to do that than

a bigger price. Except the first cut,

100 ounces down to 92, happened in 2014,

years before the inflation everyone remembers.

So if a company that has sold the same soap for years keeps finding ways

to take things out of the bottle when there's no inflation to blame,

what exactly is it selling you?

And why is the same thing happening to your cake mix?

Your toilet paper and a refrigerator that costs thirty-five hundred dollars.

Hey there, welcome back to The Overlap.

This is The Overlap. I am Joshua.

And I'm Will.

And this episode is about why the stuff that you keep buying keeps getting worse

in ways you can't quite catch.

The soap and the cake mix and the fridge,

and why we think it's one business move wearing a lot of different labels.

By the end, you'll know what the federal government's own auditors found when they

measured in grocery stores, how much of it your bill actually was,

which is less than you'd guess.

Why switching from a Maytag to a KitchenAid might not move your money anywhere

at all, and why the law that would stop it keeps dying without a vote.

We're doing it now because that eighty ounce Tide bottle only hit shelves

a year ago. Austria's disclosure law took effect in April,

and almost nobody puts the cake mix story and the refrigerator story

in the same conversation.

Let me give the inflation explanation its best shot.

it's you know, it's a serious legitimate argument.

In twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two,

the cost of almost everything that goes into a product went up.

Shipping, packing, ingredients,

labor. A company in that spot has two honest choices.

It can raise the price on the shelf,

which customers hate, or it can keep the price and put a little less in the box.

If you believe customers would rather keep the familiar price than see a bigger one,

the smaller box is the more considerate option.

That's a defensible position and for some products and some years it's probably what

happened.

And for Tide in 2014, it can't be what happened.

Breyers changed what was in it,

ice cream, in 2013. Betty Crocker cut its cake mix from 18.25 ounces

to 15.25 and then again to 13.25.

So 27% gone in total. And those cuts were spread out over years through

good stretches and bad stretches.

And if

there were mostly a response to,

you know, costs, the cuts would cluster where the costs were,

but they don't. They show up whenever someone figures out they can.

Which takes us back to an age old question in product marketing.

Picture a company that has already sold laundry soap to every household that's ever

gonna buy laundry soap. How does that company keep growing?

And the answer actually runs through the cake mix aisle and the appliance store

at the same time, which is why we're doing them in one episode.

Let's start with the situation the company's in,

because once you see that, a lot of things that look like separate annoyances start

to line up. Economists call what we have in the in the modern world a mature market.

Everybody who needs the product already has it.

Every American household that does laundry already buys detergent.

We hope. Nearly every kitchen already has a refrigerator.

nobody's out there discovering toilet paper.

Again, we hope. So the company can't grow by finding new customers,

at least not many.

And it can't grow much by selling more units because people only do so many loads

a week. And the people who own its stock still want the number to

go up every quarter because that's why you buy stock.

What's left is margin, the gap between what it costs to make the thing

and what you pay for it. There are roughly,

generally speaking, three ways to widen that gap.

The first, as we talked about,

is to raise the price. And that's the one buyers catch.

You notice when you pay more at the store,

right? When you you get your receipt back or the the

Yeah, assuming they still have an associate checking you out.

they tell you what the price is going to be the total,

and you're like, hey, whoa, that was way more than it was last week when

I bought the exact same things.

the Government Accountability Office or GAO,

which is the investigative and auditing arm of Congress,

put out a report in July of 2025,

so last year. Number report number GAO dash two five dash one zero seven four five

one, if you want to look it up.

And one of its findings is that.

consumers respond two to five times more strongly to a price increase than

to a package getting smaller. A price hike gets noticed,

a smaller box mostly doesn't. The second way that a company can deal with this

situation is to cut their costs somewhere the customer never sees,

like getting cheaper shipping contracts or better contracts with a supplier.

That one's fine as far as it goes,

and nobody's complaining about it.

It's just hard to do that, especially when trucking is a mature market as well.

There's only so many places you can go and there's a bottom line

to how much truckers will accept.

for delivering your product. So the third way is to cut what the buyer gets.

And that's what we're focusing on today.

In a spot where the buyer has easy,

no easy way to measure it is the optimal way to do it,

right? The trick there is choosing where to cut.

You cut where the measuring tool belongs to the seller.

So take Charmin, for instance.

In March of 2022, the mega roll went from 264 sheets to 244.

And the super mega, which is crazy that there is such a thing,

went from 396 to 366.

The roll still looks like a roll.

You can't see 20 missing sheets from the aisle,

and nobody counts them at home.

Because you're about more important business when you're using that product,

apparently. the package tells you the count,

and the package is printed by the people who changed the count.

Betty Crocker picked a cleverer spot.

The directions on the box match the box.

If you follow the back of a 13.25 ounce box,

you get a cake.

What broke is every recipe written by somebody else that says one box

of yellow cake mix, like your grandmother's dump cake,

or the one then in the church cookbook.

Those were written when one box meant eighteen point two five ounces

and nobody went back and changed them because they can't.

You can't go and buy like a a box and a a tenth

a box, you know, or like original size Betty Crocker boxes.

So now

We're stuck with these recipes where the dish comes out tasting not not

the way it was meant to be cooked or tasted.

doesn't taste like a but it was meant to taste.

so the unit of measure in this situation was a box,

in this case of cake mix. The company changed the box and the failure shows

up in your kitchen in a dish that's not what you hoped for,

or and you blame yourself for it.

Maybe I, you know, turn the heat up too high,

or maybe I let it cook too long or not long enough.

Put those next to the GAO's number two to five number,

and you can see why it's worth so much to a company.

A price increase costs two customers.

They may pick a cheaper option,

but a cut the consumer can't measure mostly doesn't change what people

how cheap people purchase. Betty Crocker took that door twice,

18.25 ounces to 15.25, and then again to 13.25 ounces.

And a company only goes back through a door like that that worked the first time.

Breyers did the same thing to a definition.

In 2013, some of its products dropped below the federal standard that says

ice cream has to be at least 10% milk fat.

And the label changed from ice cream to frozen dairy dessert.

Cream fell to the fourth ingredient behind corn syrup.

And it's printed right there on the carton.

You can take a look next time you're at the grocery store.

But the legal words.

are doing their job, right? They're counting on you to read frozen dairy dessert

as a fancy way of saying ice cream.

And most people do. And because none of this is a secret,

you can hear somebody say it out loud,

right? Andy Callahan, the CEO of Hostess,

the company behind the Twinkie,

was on the company's earning call for the fourth quarter of 2021,

which was held on March 1, 2022.

Earnings calls are where executives basically explain the quarter.

to the people who own stock in the company,

and they are public and usually transcribed.

Here is what he said, and I'll read it word for word.

Pricing, by definition, is a change model.

It's temporary. Customers get used to it.

When all prices go up, it helps.

Let's hang on to that idea. because I think it really drives a lot

of what we're talking about today.

that basically the idea put another way is that if every shelf in

the store shrinks its products at once,

no single increase looks like a choice.

I don't know that why this made me think about like when you go back

to your old elementary school or something,

or go visit the home that you grew up in and it feels like everything's smaller,

you know? because obviously you got bigger and your perspective's different.

But there's nothing to point to and say,

well, the refrigerator looks smaller or the the couch looks smaller.

It's everything shrinks at once.

if the store looks like that when you go to it and you,

you realize maybe the first time you go in after these things happen,

you're like, well, something seems a little off,

but you can't quite put your finger on it.

then basically you're just gonna have to I mean that at that point people adjust

to it, right? So the plan for these companies is that customers get used to it,

like you heard about. And the reality is that

customers do get used to it. They'll call and complain at first.

And then when nothing happens,

nothing changes, the price didn't go up.

So it's hard to justify going to a cheaper alternative if you think it's

not as good. so you just have to outlast that initial phase of people being upset

and you're good.

To distill all that. essentially what he's saying here is that

if everybody raises all of their prices at the same time,

it's an easier time to raise your price.

So that's why when we looked at,

you know, we we singled out the cost of eggs during Trump's term,

all the prices started going up at the same time.

And that's essentially because,

hey, look, eggs are you know what's getting the the important media bias there.

So

Let's go ahead and raise our prices too,

being the hope that if everyone increases their prices at the same time,

everybody complains about it, but no single brand gets called out,

like lately with Reese's not putting enough chocolate in their peanut butter cups,

those sorts of things. And it actually works on hardware too,

which is the same story with a power cord,

right? The buyer gets measured on the things he can check in the store

and cut on the things he can't.

In the grocery aisle, you can't check the sheet count or the ounces.

In the appliance store, you can't check for how long the thing's gonna last,

whether anyone can fix it, or what it will do to you after you've actually paid

for it. Start with whether anyone can fix it.

In January 2023, three groups:

the Public Interest Research Group,

P-I-R-G, which is a consumer advocacy nonprofit.

iFixit, which publishes free repair guides, and Repair.org,

a trade association for repair shops,

surveyed 50 appliance manufacturers,

and only seven of the 50 provide service manuals for their own products.

The manual is basically how a technician or you know you on a Saturday knows what

part failed, how to get it out,

what it's connected to, basic things,

wiring diagrams.

So when 43 out of 50 of those manufacturers keep that information to themselves,

a broken dryer stops being a part you could look up and becomes a service call from

whoever the maker authorizes. Or you get a new dryer.

Then there's what it does to you after you've paid for it.

Samsung sells a refrigerator line called Family Hub with a big touch screen

in the door.

Priced from $1,800 to $3,500 for a refrigerator.

In September of 2025, Samsung pushed an update over the internet that

put ads on that screen when the fridge was idle.

They call that idle screen the cover screen.

When that update first went out,

you could dismiss individual ads one at a time,

and that's it. A later update added a switch to turn them off,

but

Think about the order of events.

You paid up to $3,500.

You take your fridge home. And then from the company's side,

a feature got added to your kitchen that you didn't buy and you can't turn off.

In every case, the company is cutting something you were relying on

it to measure for you. The box was your unit.

The fill line was your unit. Ice cream was the definition you trusted.

The service manual is how you could figure out what was wrong.

And the screen on your fridge is a thing you paid for that company paid paid

for that the company still controls.

The cut always lands in the place where you the buyer's only ruler belongs

to the seller. And brand names work the same way.

You think you're comparing companies when you compare brands,

but Whirlpool owns Maytag, Amana,

Jenn-Air, and KitchenAid. Walk down an appliance aisle and you can

be choosing between five nameplates all from the same company.

In the dairy case, Danone owns Silk,

So Delicious, Horizon, International Delight, and STōK.

The brand name STōK,

STōK, it's coffee.

okay, thanks. the brand name is the last way most of us judge quality

and the seller prints that too.

Okay, so so here's the company side,

right? The way their own trade group makes their side.

The Consumer Brands Association speaks for the people who make the boxes.

So when Senator Bob Casey put up a bill against this in 2024,

that association's president, David Chavern,

said the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission,

already has the authority to go after deceptive practices.

And that companies are transparent about both price and size.

On the package itself, he has a point.

A company can sell whatever size of box it wants,

right? The weight is printed on the package in ounces.

The sheet count is on every Charmin package.

Frozen dairy dessert is on the Breyers carton in letters.

You can read without your glasses.

Nobody lied. If you care about ounces,

read the ounces.

Adults are allowed to make choices with information that's sitting right

in front of them. And the industry's point about price goes like this.

If customers punish a price increase hard and barely notice a smaller box,

then shrinking the box is giving people what they prefer.

That breaks on the Tide cap. The information is right in front of you,

works for the ounces. For the fill line,

the information right in front of you is the line.

The line is now wrong on purpose.

The correction is a sentence on the back telling you to ignore 20% of it,

just like toothpaste. Toothpaste has a allotted amount that you should dispense with

every turn. But your dentist has a very different recommendation

for how much toothpaste you should put on your toothbrush.

So the correction is a sentence on the back telling you to ignore 20% of it.

And the second part, the downsizing.

is what people prefer, breaks on the same GAO number Will gave you earlier.

If you if you chose to look that up and you're following along with bated breath,

people respond two to five times more to price than to size.

That number is usually quoted as consumers prefer downsizing.

What it actually measures is that consumers notice price and mostly don't notice

size.

A preference would mean people picked the smaller box with both options

in front of them. And the GAO number says most of them never really saw the choice.

And the CEO said it himself consumers get used to it.

And that's the business plan, read aloud on a call with the investors

of that company about a company that sells snack cakes.

And calling a smaller box of preference related relative to a higher price.

It's like saying, Do have a preference between getting hung or hanged

or standing in front of a firing squad,

right? you could say that most people choose the firing squad,

but it's not really a preference.

So but all in all,

the whole thing is an amazing thing to say about snack cakes,

right? It's more like he's describing a vaccine schedule.

Right. Quote pricing by definition is a change model.

Why don't they put that on a Twinkie wrapper,

right? Right under the ingredients.

Contains wheat, soy, and a change model.

But in fairness to Hostess, the Twinkie hasn't shrunk in this story,

as far as anything we have says.

We're not aware of any shrinkage there.

I was, however, disappointed to find out that the Twinkie will not last through

the apocalypse and like it doesn't have an infinite shelf life.

Nor should it.

Fair enough. but you know, this this might they might actually be

the most honest company in the episode,

which is saying a lot. Like that's the bar now.

Congratulations, Twinkie.

Way to stay the same size, you you beautiful piece of cream and whatever that other

stuff is. Plastic. Yeah.

Plastic. It's just mostly plastic,

let's be honest.

The Tide label, though, right?

Think about it, right? Click keep like I I I run this scenario through my head,

right? Where they're in this meeting and somebody says,

Well, the cap is too big now. Of course,

for some reason, my corporate meeting accent or or

Invoice, yeah.

vo voice voice messing around is always an admin from the 1920s.

Yeah. Now see here, this box is too big.

exactly.

And everyone says retooling the cap costs money.

What if we just tell them to underfill it?

And of course, everybody nods

And keep the money.

and stands up and claps. And then a person in legal writes 80% of the

way up the line with a hyphen,

which is the most lawyer thing I think I've ever seen.

And it goes out to every laundry room in the country.

Good job, Peterson. next next bottle says fill to the line and then pour some

of it back. Bottle after that just says use your best judgment and good luck.

Right. Eventually that cap is a suggestion,

right? The cap becomes a vibe.

Right. But part of the defense survives though,

which is if the claim is that this is how corporations got rich off

the last few years of inflation,

the numbers don't really back it.

The same GAO report measured how much of the price increase in

the consumer price index, the government's main inflation measure,

came from downsizing. From December twenty nineteen to December twenty twenty four,

prices in the index went up thirty-four point five percent.

Downsizing added about point zero six percentage points of that,

which is a rounding error.

And the bigger version of the story,

sometimes called greedflation,

is shakier than people want it to be.

In January 2023, three economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City,

Glover, Mustre-del-Río, and von Ende-Becker,

published a paper finding that in 2021,

company markups, meaning price cut prices over costs,

rose 3.4% at a time when inflation,

measured by PCE, which is the personal consumption expenditures index.

The Fed prefers ran 5.8%. They said that markups could account for more than half

of inflation that year. When the same team followed up on in May of 2023,

they found the effect faded through 2022.

Then in May of 2024, economists at the San Francisco Fed,

sorry, Leduc, Li, and Liu looked at markups across the whole economy

and found them essentially flat.

The spikes were in a couple of places,

autos and petroleum.

So if you were hoping to find a giant coordinated grab in the fin

in the national numbers, the national numbers say no.

And I'll take that, right? I don't I don't have a a a great answer to it.

Like 0.06 points is is pretty small,

right? The best measure anybody ha has says that shrinking packages

did not really drive inflation of the last five years.

And the economy wide markup story didn't hold up past 2021.

So if somebody tells me like shrinkflation is why groceries got expensive,

unfortunately the numbers essentially say they're wrong.

And I

would not try to be that actually guy.

if if I could at all avoid it.

But what it doesn't settle really is the thing that this episode is about,

right? The Tide cuts started in 2014.

Breyers was 2013. The move doesn't need inflation to work,

it just works better with inflation as a cover,

which is essentially what Callahan said.

So let's stay with the line of who carries this burden because 0.06 points makes

it sound like nobody does, and that's a number involving the whole economy.

It's an average across everything in the index,

including all the things that never shrank.

The same GAO report looked category by category,

and inside specific aisles, the picture is different.

In household paper products, which is toilet paper and paper towels,

downsizing added three percentage points to the price increase over those five

years. In cereal, it added 1.6.

Then the GAO looked at the individual items that were actually downsized

and asked how much the price went up per unit,

per ounce, per sheet, per whatever the product is sold by.

The range ran from 11.6% from paper towels to 32.4% for coffee.

So for coffee they got smaller,

each ounce cost 32.4% more and the price on the shelf might not have moved at all.

The GAO also found that lower income households responded more strongly

to these changes. They're the ones watching every price and switching brands,

which makes sense. If your budget has no slack in it,

you pay attention to it. But it also means the people working hardest

to measure what they're getting are the people this move is built to slip past.

The family that buys the store brand coffee and watches the sticker price

is exactly the same family that gets the 32% per ounce increase without

the sticker ever changing.

I wish I could tell you who one of those families is.

Nothing we have names one, but the GAO measured prices across the whole country.

It didn't interview a mother in Toledo about her coffee.

and nothing we have shows any US rule requiring the companies doing

the downsizing to tell anybody which products they shrink,

by how much or when. The disclosure laws we know about are all in Europe.

So the person who pays the most has no name on the record.

And the company that shows you the full list of or the company that could show

you the full list of what they cut is under no obligation to do so.

Then there's the appliance version and it lands on a different person.

You buy the fridge once. You don't get to notice the change and buy

a different one next week the way you can with,

cereal or or dryer sheets. If your dryer dies and you bought

one of the 43 out of 50 makers who don't hand out their service mount manuals,

the part might be cheap. And you might never know that because

the document that tells you which part is held by the manufacturer.

That bill falls heaviest on whoever can least afford a surprise because they're

the ones who'd most like to fix it themselves.

Me being one of those people. I I had a dryer that I had got in 1992 that

I just I just systematically changed out.

It was like the the the ship of what is it?

ship of

Theseus, yes.

Theseus, yes. The entire dryer was different.

The only thing that was the same was the outside of it,

right? But

The Samsung buyer paid between $1,800 and $3,500 for a refrigerator.

I'm never going to be in the market for a refrigerator with

an advertising department or an advertising budget.

Right? But somebody saved up for that,

right? That family hub and the thing they saved for changed after they took it home.

After being at the risk of being that guy.

when a refrigerator costs more than my first car,

I have got concerns.

Right.

but you know, I want to push on the appliance part a little bit though,

because having read ahead, I know you're about to throw something in the pile that

I don't think belongs there.

KitchenAid.

Exactly. The stand mixer has a gear in it,

the worm follower gear. Don't ask me what that causes to happen,

I know exactly what it looks like in my head though.

but it's a gear. Yeah.

Like I can picture it when you say it because I have changed that specific gear.

Right, those plastic gears. basically,

yeah, it's it's made of nylon instead of metal.

And when it strips, people find out it's plastic and assume that that's

the company corner cutting. It isn't new though.

The nylon gear actually dates back to the Hobart era.

if they're it's there on purpose and it's a fuse.

When you overload the mixer with a dough that's too stiff,

the gear is designed to fail first so that the motor doesn't.

The motor's the expensive part and the gear is the cheap part that sacrifices

itself.

Right. And that that one bothers me more than I think

Okay.

I'd like, because from the outside,

I I can't really tell the difference,

right? The a cheap part that fails looks exactly like a cheap part that fails

on purpose to protect the expensive one.

If if I'd just been like handed that gear with no history,

I'd have put it in this episode as like exhibit A,

here we go, and and you know, exposure.

But every other thing I said, I just said about appliances though.

I have to admit, I'm judging from the outside too.

And from the outside, I can't really tell which is which,

but no refrigerator I've had has the ice maker been able to keep up with

the amount of ice that I use on a regular basis.

Which is your argument in a way,

but it cuts both directions. If the buyer can't measure quality,

the buyer can't measure good design either.

Some of what people are angry about is the gear,

and some of it isn't. Samsung putting ads on the door of a $3,500 fridge after

the sale isn't a fuse, but if we're going to say the cut lands where buyer can't

see, we have to admit we can't always see it either.

The other place this lands is on the idea that you can just switch.

The standard answer to to a company that treats you badly is to take your money

elsewhere.

so you're done with Whirlpool and you buy a Maytag or an Amana or a Jenn-

Air or a KitchenAid. Whirlpool owns all of them.

You're done with Horizon, so you switch to Silk or So Delicious.

Danone owns all of those,

plus International Delight and STōK.

The money goes to the same place and the company books the sale either way.

Right. So if we go back all the way back to the Tide bottle,

right, eighty percent of the way up the line in the cold open,

that really reads like a a petty little soap soap trick,

right? It it turns out to be an honest sentence.

Every other cut we talked about hides in a measurement you trust,

right? The box for the cake mix has a bag inside of it.

All they have to do is change the amount that goes into that bag

and they actually don't even need to change the the the

actual box itself. They don't even have to retool it.

They say it's for freshness or whatever.

I don't know. Anyway, I I digress.

But the box for the cake mix, the the word on the ice cream carton,

the role, the brand, the screen,

on the Tide bottle, they literally just couldn't hide it because the

cap is a physical object in your hand.

So they legally had to put it in writing.

That sentence is the company confirming in print on its own product that

the measuring tool it gave you is no longer true and that fixing it is your job now.

Nobody else makes the box, the cap,

the label, the brand name, whoever,

you know, makes the the measuring tool can move the line.

Which is why my answer to this problem is the law.

I practice law as you know. And this kind of problem is the kind

of problem that national consumer laws are built for.

The seller owns the ruler, you make a rule about the ruler,

and it works. Hungary excuse me,

Hungary required disclosure of downsized products starting in February twenty twenty

four. France did it in July of twenty twenty four,

and Austria's law took effect in April first of this year,

twenty twenty six.

Remember the GAO number. People respond two to five times more to

a price change than a size change.

A required notice turns the size change back into something that people notice.

And the margin from the move depended on nobody noticing.

Disclosure takes that away without telling anybody what size box to actually sell.

Then I guess here is my question,

right? As a guy who just buys the soap,

why don't we have it? Right?

Somebody already wrote it. On February 28th,

2024, Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat,

introduced the Shrinkflation Prevention Act with Elizabeth Warren,

Tammy Baldwin, Jacky Rosen, and Cory Booker.

All of those names I'm very familiar with,

except Jacky Rosen. I would have had,

I don't know,

The FTC treat shrinkflation as a like a deception practice.

And then it would have let state attorneys actually generally sue in this

in this scenario, right? It it got hearings,

but it never actually went to a vote.

In the Senate, the Democrats controlled at the time,

the House version died the same way.

In September of 2025, Lou Correa,

a California Democrat, tried again in the House.

And his bill even had an easy out built in.

Print the old size and the new size on the front of the package,

and you're covered. It went to the Energy and Commerce Committee in

a house that Republicans control,

and nothing really has happened to it since.

And the FTC, the agency,

the industry said already had the authority that it needed,

has never defined.

downsizing as deceptive. The GAO

Remind me which branch

of the government it the FTC is under?

That'd be would that be executive?

I I don't d do you know off the top of your head?

I if you if you ask anybody in the government

I think it would be the executive,

right? Which is under the president.

Just just throwing that out there.

right now, they're all under the president.

Right, yeah.

Or at least that's how it feels.

Indeed. Sorry, I just I throw that out there.

But the

no, it's fine. The FTC, right,

the agency that's supposed to have the authority never defined it as deceptive,

right? So the GAO actually said so in that report that we've been quoting anyway.

Meanwhile, the people who make the boxes pay for a seat at the table.

a watchdog report in 2021 counted about sixty million dollars in lobbying

by the Consumer Brands Association since 2008.

Which made it one of the biggest spenders in food.

General Mills

So one thing that didn't

shrink is their their lobbying efforts,

huh?

We're right. i if you'd have just taken that 60 million and spread it

out over the product, you wouldn't have had to change the size or the price.

Can we be honest

Right.

about it here? Right. So $60 million in lobbying.

And of course, General Mills, which I'm sure you've all heard of.

You've they're they're they own Betty Crocker and a bunch of other cereal

and various other things, reported that 236,553.

Dollars of what it paid the association in 2025 went to lobbying.

On the appliance side, there's the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers,

whose members make more than 95% of the home appliances shipped in this country.

It helped write the letters manufacturers sent against Illinois' repair bill

in 2018. In New Hampshire in 2019.

Its representative told a committee that independent repair could get children hurt.

In twenty twenty three,

Wow.

it testified against Minnesota's repair bill,

and Whirlpool pays its dues.

I can't show you a receipt that says a vote was bought,

right? And nobody will would file that and and attorneys would tell them definitely

not to file that. But what I can show you is is the move,

right? That because people have said it out loud.

Callahan said it about prices.

When when all prices go up, it helps.

And the consumers get used to it.

Steve Bannon said it about politics to the writer Michael Lewis in 2018.

Quote, the real opposition is the media,

and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

End quote.

And the administration runs it in court.

225 executive orders in the first year,

judges blocking some of them within weeks,

and a Supreme Court that in 2025 limited how far a single judge's block can reach.

Do it now. Let the court sort it out later.

And by the time anybody does anything,

everybody's kind of used to it.

20 missing sheets is not going to make the news.

Three bills and zero votes never makes the news either.

The fix being slow is how this whole thing actually works and plays out.

Classic slow play. That's what I've been missing since while I sit here saying

the law fixes it. The law is the slow lane and they're counting on it.

My wife does most of the shopping in our house,

thank goodness. And she was telling me the boxes were getting smaller long before

I read a word of this. And I took it as small talk.

Person in the aisle saw it first.

Every committee on that list was behind her.

I'll believe the law sorry, I still believe the law fixes it.

it fixes it when it answers to the person in the aisle instead of

the people paying for a seat at the table.

Well, look, Hungary, France, and Austria passed the same kind of law that

Bob Casey wrote, right? The difference was who their governments answered

to on the day of the vote. Ours had three chances,

and and not once did it actually ever take.

The government is supposed to be us.

And until the people in the aisle make it act like it,

the line on the cap stays exactly where it is.

If take one thing to work tomorrow,

take Callahan's sentence. Consumers get used to it.

A CEO said that to investors on a public call about prices going up.

Every cut in this episode depends on you doing exactly that.

The cap, the cake mix, the sheet count,

the ads on the thirty-five hundred dollar fridge,

and three bills that die without ever seeing a vote.

Getting used to it is the part they need from you,

and you can say no to that part for free.

I think the the dumbest thing of all of this is still in the cap,

though, right? A company changed

Mm-hmm.

the size of the bottle, kept the exact same cup,

and decided that the cheapest fix was to just teach every household

in America to eyeball about 80% of a line.

So they made up, they made up the measuring device without ever changing it.

And then the industry told Congress the rules were fine,

and and Congress just kind of agreed by never actually doing anything about it.

So I I mean I I'm I'm assuming by the end of next year

at least one I don't know, maybe California might have

a shrinkflation disclosure law enforced beyond France,

Hungary and Austria. What do you think?

Sounds like a very California thing to do.

Although it seems

Yeah.

like everybody should be upset about this.

it's doesn't matter where you are.

That's the thing. And we should all be we should all

be annoyed by it at the very least.

I think of of various recipes over the years that my my grandmother gave

me for various things. you take you can make a a cleaner out of anything with

a little bit of vinegar, lemon juice,

water, and a shaved bar of naphtha soap.

You know, and and if you look at the naphtha soap,

it's also changed in size and changed in price.

So I I mean, we have little things like this that we think,

well, you know, grandma's old recipe doesn't work on these newfound.

seed oils, on clothes or whatever,

but the truth might just be that the the naphtha bar bar is smaller.

True. Well,

So I I mean I don't know.

regardless of which of those things it is,

and it's probably all of them,

we appreciate you listeners for spending your time with us today.

go look at the the the cap on your detergent bottle.

then be kind to each other, help out where you can,

and you can find everything we do at FOF dot foundation.

And that's it.

Just FOF dot foundation, no .com,

no anything else, and you will find us online.

Make sure to check out you know,

our Apple podcasts if that's where you listen to us at,

or and give us five stars there.

If you listen to us on Spotify,

thank you for listening to us on Spotify.

We actually have way more listeners on Apple Podcasts,

but thank you for listening to us on Spotify.

That that means a lot to us. And I guess that being said,

we'll see you next week. Yeah.

Let's hope so. We're all still here.

And like we always say, bye.

Bye. Bye.