Robert Crandall started it. Or maybe he just codified it. In 1987, the American Airlines CEO looked at a complimentary salad and saw an inefficiency. Not a problem with service, but with profit. He removed one olive from every bowl.
One olive. Gone.
Would you notice? Probably not. You might even have hated olives. But millions of flyers? Over a year? The savings piled up. Crandall saved $40,00 back then, a sum worth triple that today. He didn’t steal a loaf of bread. He just took a crumb. A crumb nobody asked him to touch.
This is the mechanics of modern decay. Call it shrinkflation. Call it skimpflation. Call it what you like, but the result is the same: we are living in a world where the good parts of things are slowly, quietly excised until only the shell remains.
Зміст
What is shrinkflation and how do supermarkets do it?
The game hasn’t stopped. If anything, the slices have gotten thinner and faster. In 2024 consumer group Which? looked into supermarket shelves and found the same trick. It’s everywhere now. PG Tips tea bags? Used to come 180. Now they are 140. The box looks identical. You reach in, pour a bag, and keep going.
Then there’s Tesco. Their ready-made lasagne used to claim 23 percent beef. Now it’s 19 percent. The meat content has dropped while the price stayed steady. You get less protein, more filler.
Still, at least it’s no longer horse meat.
Progress is relative, apparently.
This strategy works because it preys on our attention span. We don’t measure the volume of lasagne we buy. We recognize the shape of the tray. The tray hasn’t changed. Only what’s inside has.
Why do experts call this ‘salami tactics’?
The military has a name for this. Salami tactics.
Imagine you own a beautiful, thick slice of cured meat. It’s yours. Intact. You love it. Someone tries to steal the whole thing? You’d fight back. You’d scream. You’d call the police.
But what if they just shave off the edge? A millimeter here. A gram there.
Russia has perfected this over borders and infrastructure. Drones fly over. Ships hover near undersea cables. Cyberattacks hit the power grid. People are poisoned on home soil. Each event is too small, or too ambiguous, to warrant a full-scale response. You hesitate. You think. By the time you react, three more slices are gone. Your agency over your own territory has shrunk.
We are losing control of our lives one minor annoyance at a time.
How corporate and political entities use incremental changes
China planted a listening device in a car used by a UK prime minister in 2022. Did we ban all cars made in that country? Did we deport every Jaeco owner? No. We shrugged.
The tactic spills into our daily existence. It explains why British Airways decided that two Hobnob biscuits constitute a “snack” on a pan-European flight. Two. Tiny biscuits. Call that sustenance if you want, but it’s not food.
It’s also why a Toffee Crisp lost its right to be called a chocolate bar. The regulatory bodies demanded accurate labeling. Why? Because the actual chocolate content was so low it no longer qualified. The name was the lie. The product was the slice taken from the real thing.
Why small fines feel like systemic abuse
It happens at the parking lot. At the hospital.
My local NHS hospital charges £2 overnight for parking. Fair enough? Maybe. But if you forget, if you’re exhausted after five hours in the A&E with a sick child, Parkingeye shows up. The fine? £100.
A hundred pounds for a missed transaction in a moment of crisis. You can’t really protest this. You aren’t fighting a dragon; you’re fighting a database entry. So you pay. You resent it, but you pay.
Parkingeye. A name designed to make you feel watched, guilty, and small.
I find it impossible to muster enough contempt for these people.
Climate change joins the fray. It’s not a malice, but it’s a slice all the same. The nice things are vanishing not because companies want to save on olives, but because the infrastructure for those things is crumbling. Cheap flights to the Mediterranean? Affordable heating? Petrol-engine hot hatches? Those are becoming memories. Luxury items now.
Unless you have money.
If you’re wealthy, the salami never touches your plate. The olives are there. The beef content is high. The flights are comfortable. Salami tactics only work on those who cannot afford to fight. We are aspirational people. We work hard, waiting for our numbers to come up. Waiting to become the class that gets to keep their salami intact.
