Canceled flight ? Poor quality clothes? Disappointing meal? Blame skimpflation, the hidden curse of 2022

Your flight was canceled during school holidays? The delivery of your new sofa has been delayed? Did your last restaurant meal disappoint you? Are your new socks transparent? Are you reading this while waiting for customer service? Does everything feel a little worse?

The cost of living crisis has given British households a crash course in the misery caused by inflation, which reached heights not seen since the 1980s. But what if there was also another force at work in the economy, lurking in the background and making a bad situation look a little gloomier? /p>

Welcome to "skimpflation" - a term popularized in the US and gaining traction in the UK. “Skimflation is when consumers get less for their money,” says Alan Cole, writer at Full Stack Economics and former senior economist on the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. "Unlike typical inflation, where they pay more for the same goods, skimpflation occurs when they pay the same price for something that has deteriorated in quality."

The most common example is "having to wait longer for things," says Cole. “If you have recently ordered furniture or appliances, you will find that delivery times are slow. This loss of speed is a degradation of quality."

Thanks to the current crisis, we all know what inflation means: the price of things increases, sometimes d 'a tantalizing amount. There are also many examples of shrinkage, which is when a company reduces the size of a pack of chocolate or crisps, for example, but the price remains the same.< /p>

But even if it's not so easy to identify, when you start looking for skimpflation, you see it everywhere. It's at the supermarket, when you pass someone one that fills the shelves because more expensive night work has been cut, or when your favorite brand is gone because the range has been reduced to cut warehouse costs.

It's in disappointing new clothes that wobble after just one use, or when you book a vacation only to have your flight repro grammed, or that you now have to pay for your food and drinks on board. Then when you try to get your money back or complain, you find that the only way is to use a live chat with an entity that may or may not be human.