Satire | The consequences of shrinkflation

In a distant future, years and years from now, live the Smiths — a normal upper-middle class family of the day, living paycheck to paycheck. Sometimes the lights go out. Sometimes they can’t afford water. They’re the lucky ones. 

“The groceries were $14,000 this week?” Mr. Smith exclaims, shocked. 

“That’s right, I had a ton of coupons,” Mrs. Smith responds. 

“But $2,500 worth? Wow! Great job.” 

At this point in the future, there have been thousands of recessions — which were really depressions — since the one in 2008. Inflation keeps raising prices. People can’t afford to die anymore — being buried costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. And even though they could just be cremated at a cheaper price, some people refuse to, “for religious reasons.” So they instead stick their families with the bill, ruining them for generations. 

The Smiths are one of the lucky few with no debt. They don’t believe in college. They don’t believe in school at all. They sent their children to work for tips the day they turned 14 so they could learn one of the only careers left — waiting tables. This is also one of the best ways to keep yourself fed these days. Restaurants throw away a lot of food, after all. 

To make one club sandwich now, you need bread, obviously, but most people just make their own bread, as the ones the grocery stores sell are much too small to make sandwiches. Then, they use eight tubs of mayonnaise, five full containers of ham, 10 bags of lettuce, and 22 tomatoes. And if you want it toasted? That’s 32 sticks of butter. If you’re familiar with Mini Brands, you’re familiar with the size of the average grocery today. 

Manufacturers realized that they could increase profits more and more every time they shrunk their products — so they did it bit by bit, ounce by ounce, until most products were about an inch tall. That’s when they had to stop, before they got even more microscopic and impractical. And since people had to buy doubles, then triples, then more and more of their products, the corporations got even more money. They lobbied New Washington to block any regulations that could prevent this, because it’s a free market. If everyone wants to sell mini versions of their previous products, that’s their prerogative, according to the current administration. 

The Smiths can afford groceries, unlike a lot of people. Those people die, generally, because EBT and SNAP and WIC and free lunch at schools and everything else has been done away with. It all just felt too socialist. Every school is private these days after the new federal government cut all funding for schools to focus on the military. They like the military. A third of all children join. Hey, free food, free education, free childcare? What could beat that? 

School shootings and plane hijacking have also gone down by 99%. This is because there are no more planes, since we ran out of fuel, and no more schools without elaborate screenings to enter, but New Washington likes to take credit. Most people just take everything out on their neighbors now — or they wage war outside the Whole Foods, attacking people on the way to their cars. This is how many survive. 

Some people do this but don’t tell their families out of shame. They say, “just popping off to the store!” Then, when they’re caught by the enforcers and placed in new prison, their families don’t find out until they see them on the 6 o’clock news. A lot of people can’t afford Wi-Fi or smartphones anymore, so the public access antenna television stations have come back in a major way. Televisions are all the size of smartphones now, of course. 

Scientists tried to shrink laptops into a microchip to be inserted into the brain, but that didn’t work. That’s where all of the zombies came from. If they catch you, they implant you with the chip that makes you brainless, just like them. The chip shows you YouTube Shorts that play until all brain function ceases. All YouTube videos are now 3 seconds long at absolute maximum. They ran out of server space back during the second Data War, and had to delete all of their old videos and limit uploads. If you want to watch a movie on YouTube now, you have to watch 2,400 3-second-long videos in a playlist. The ads are unskippable, even with YouTube Disney Max Plus Premium. Because what are you going to do, not watch the movie? 

Many people choke to death with the size they make food these days. One kid in Boston thought a bowl of popcorn was a bowl of soup, so he tried to drink it without chewing. The microscopic pieces of popcorn shredded the inside of his throat. Only the very wealthiest one percent can afford health insurance, so when people get sick, they just die. Their family often places them beside their mailbox in lieu of a funeral. The mailbox symbolizes a coffin, and garbage men pick them up on Fridays for the mass graves. This service is provided with normal trash pickups, which happen every other day, as people go through so much packaging now, with the shrinking of everything. 

This day is rapidly approaching the present, as we allow companies to shrink their products and raise their prices with no retribution. Heed my warnings and return to the farms, or the sea, or wherever you can find your own food. Goodbye and good luck. I hope we meet under better circumstances, some place with food the size it ought to be. 

Alaina McCall writes things sometimes. If you find any of these things coming to pass, you might be at Giant Eagle, or any other local grocery store. If you want someone to cry with, you can reach them at mccallalaina@gmail.com