To be a public commentator it is necessary to continually find some new thing to comment about. It’s the same with “influencers” on TokTok and the like - it must always be next week’s trend to be showcased, no one gets famous by being old fashioned. Which brings us to this new concept of skimpflation:

“Nothing prepared us for how much life has gotten worse,” Cole told the Guardian. “Most of these factors haven’t been picked up on by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We thought these changes to products were going to be temporary, so it was reasonable not to account for the changes. But now everything has got worse all at the same time, so even if you tried to account for them, you probably couldn’t.”

Even if skimpflation cannot be measured conveniently, consumers have certainly noticed that the quality of service seems to be deteriorating everywhere. Consumer satisfaction indices are trending down, as they have been since before the onset of the pandemic, while consumer confidence was mildly better last month after dropping over the summer.

The thing is this isn’t new. In fact, it’s what those in our right minds have been warning about concerning the minimum wage.

There are a number of axes along which producers can adapt to a change in the price of inputs. One of which is simply make the product worse. Which is one of the things we said could/would hap[pen from a rise in the price of labour. That the offerings to us consumers would decline in quality. Here we have the effects of a rise in the cost of labour and the pointing is to the decline in the quality being offered to consumers.

We ourselves will just have to remain unfamous therefore by continuing to be old fashioned. A rise in the price of labour reduces the quality of products offered to consumers. And?