Your chocolate bar is shrinking on purpose

It's called shrinkflation: instead of raising the price, the maker reduces the quantity. The packet looks the same, so does the receipt, but there's less product inside. Since almost nobody re-reads the grams on the label, the price rise slips by unnoticed.

The most famous case was Toblerone in 2016: in the UK, the brand widened the valleys between its chocolate peaks to shave weight off the bar without changing the box. The resulting silhouette caused such outrage that it made newspapers around the world — and the brand backtracked two years later.

The practice is legal, but increasingly less invisible: since July 2024, France requires supermarkets to flag products that have shrunk while their price held steady or rose.

The moral: the price per kilo — that small print on the shelf — is the one number that can't lie.