In early 2024, then-President Joe Biden identified “shrinkflation” as a major source of company price gouging. The move was in-line with the standing Democratic strategy to shift inflation blame away from excessive fiscal and monetary stimulus and onto greedy corporations.

We investigated this issue in June last year, leveraging Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the frequency and degree of resizing items in the consumer price index (CPI) to estimate how much of aggregate inflation was the result of package resizing instead of outright price increases for packages.

We found resizing rates were no higher than pre-pandemic levels. Further, inflation in the “food-at-home” sub-index of the CPI, including the type of snack products that received most scrutiny by the administration, barely exhibited any shrinkflation. Even in 2022, the worst year of the post-pandemic inflation surge, food-at-home prices increased 11.8 percent overall and by 11.5 percent excluding shrinkflation. That is, downsizing products accounted for just 0.3 percentage points of the price index uplift.

A year later, a GAO report requested by the Senate Subcommittee on Education and the American Family finds the same thing. “Product downsizing and upsizing are longstanding practices that have varied in frequency over time,” reads the report. Analyzing the same BLS data, the GAO agreed resizing rates were highest in 2016, 2018, and 2019. The rates dipped during the COVID-19 pandemic and increased in early 2022 amid exceptionally high inflation (which is unsurprising). Post-pandemic downsizing rates weren’t any higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Our analyses also broadly concur over which specific items exhibited the most shrinkflation. We found that between December 2019 and March 2024, the effect was largest for snacks, household paper products, ice cream, candy, and then coffee. Even for these products the size of the effect of shrinkflation relative to package price changes was small. For instance, out of the total 26.2 percent increase in snack prices, only 2.5 percentage points were the product of downsizing. The GAO analyzed the data over a longer period (December 2019 to December 2024), but the results line up. The five sectors with the largest effects are the same, except breakfast cereal displaced coffee as the fifth largest effect for the GAO. Their longer timeframe shows household paper products, not snacks, suffered the most shrinkflation but even then, it accounted for only 3 percentage points of the overall 31 percent increase in price of these items.

Ultimately, the report agrees with us that “the impact of product size changes on overall inflation has been relatively small.” The broad takeaway is thus the same as ours: shrinkflation is a normal business practice but one that “accounted for less than 1/10 of a percentage point of the 34.5 percent increase in overall consumer prices” from 2019 to 2024.

We were always skeptical of the “shrinkflation” scapegoat. To the extent that it occurred it was a consequence of inflationary policies, rather than the cause of broad price rises. Now the GAO confirms that this was a tiny component of price rises anyway. Certain Democratic lawmakers wasted months grandstanding about certain package sizes when inflation’s actual drivers were staring them in the face.