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Honey, I shrunk the honey jar — but not the price tag. It’s an all-too-common experience nowadays regarding everything from shrinking soda cans to your favorite boxed cereal’s price skyrocketing: You head to the grocery store, ready to grab your favorite snack, and suddenly, it feels a bit lighter in your hand — although the hit on your wallet is certainly just as heavy as before. It seems the shrinkflation creep — where all sorts of products, from Gatorade and candy bars to mouthwash and even toilet paper, get downsized while maintaining the same cost — is a plague of the current age, but the tactic dates back to the Middle Ages: And those caught engaging in the practice back then could find themselves beaten by a mob, fined, or dunked at the bottom of the river.
Inflation is on our minds lately, as the prices of basic necessities soar to the point of even affecting our grocery preferences – and even hitting our fast-food faves, like KFC. One common tactic employed by many brands to bypass supply chain issues is to reduce product size — often to the chagrin of consumers, who have been seeing up to ⅓ of grocery store items affected by the shrink. While the term “shrinkflation” may only have been coined in the 2000s, feudal Europe finessed the technique. Bread was the staple of the medieval European diet and food economy, and as the setting of never-ending wars, famine, profound inequality, and frequent bouts of scarcity, all often had repercussions on the availability of basic produce. To avoid upheavals caused by rising costs, bread prices were often fixed — meaning bakers had to find ways around this by either reducing the size of loaves or the quality of the product, or risk having their businesses (or lives) destroyed via mob violence.
Your punishment varied depending on where you lived
Throughout pre-industrial Europe, bread was such an important product that bakers were, to some extent, considered functionaries of the state. “Bread was considered a public service necessary to keep the people from rioting,” writes culinary historian Linda Civitello in her book, “Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People” (via the Smithsonian Magazine). “Bakers, therefore, were public servants, so the police controlled all aspects of bread production.”As a result of this, authorities, wary of potential trouble, regulated the prices and size of bread tightly. In 13th-century England, for instance, the Assize of Bread and Ale — which remained in force for over half a millennium – allowed the weight of loaves to reflect the price of grain at any given time.
This did not stop bakers from employing sneaky tactics, but often at a great cost, as penalties could range from mere fines to more drastic measures. While “shrinkflation” offenders today are often met with consumer frustration and animated Reddit communities, Europe’s medieval ancestors went a little further. Medieval English bakers could face fines or flogging if the twelve loaves sold came under the required price — why many added an extra for insurance, leading to the expression “baker’s dozen.” Over in Ljubljana, in what is modern-day Slovenia, however, “cheating” bakers could be met with a crescendo of punishments: for the first infraction, a fine; the second, being put in a pillory in front of their bakery; and for repeat offenders, being shoved into a cage and thrown off the Cobblers’ Bridge into the Ljubljanica River.