Shrinkflation is the one thing that shows no sign of shrinking - Vladimir McTavish

They may only only be big enough now to help you work and rest. If you want to play too, you might have to eat another one. But everything was big when we were kids, mainly because we were small at the time.

I know someone who was so angry about the shrinking size of Bounty bars that he wrote to the manufacturers to complain. He said they were not just smaller but had less coconut and worse still, no longer had the cardboard tray inside the wrapper.

Anyway, for a year or so now, retail analysts have come up with a term for this practice which has been ripping us all off for decades. They are calling it “Shrinkflation”. We didn’t call it that when I was a lad. But then we didn’t have retail analysts back then.

There are quite a few of them employed by the BBC these days. They often pop up on the lunchtime news doing a piece about the price of your weekly shop, which quite often seems more like a free advert for Tesco or Marks & Spencer.

Anyway, shrinkflation is now getting out of hand, we are told. According to The Guardian, the cost of a tube of Aquafresh toothpaste has gone up from £1.20 to £2, although it has shrunk from 100ml to 75ml, while a 600mg jar of Nescafe now only contains 550mg.

A friend of mine tells me that her therapist is now charging the same for a 50-minute session than she used to pay for an hour. That literally is shrinkflation.

It doesn’t end there. Penguins can no longer be called chocolate biscuits, because the cocoa content has been reduced. But apparently they can still be called “penguins’ which I would have thought was something of a double standard. They may not contain enough chocolate anymore, but they always contained 0 per cent penguin.

Anyway, this con of charging the same for less has been going on for as long as I can remember. It just seems there is a lot more of it happening.

Shrinkflation is the one thing that shows no sign of shrinking.