I keep seeing businesses talk about efficiency like it’s neutral, but the actual pattern often feels like fewer humans, narrower support, and more stuff pushed onto the customer. Sometimes the pricing barely changes, which makes the whole thing feel a bit cheeky.
Has anyone seen this play out in a way that customers accepted, or does it usually just degrade trust and push people away?
Shrinkflation extends to more than chips and cookies 
“Efficiency” only seems to get accepted when the company makes the trade-off super explicit and gives you a lever to pull.
The “customers accepted it” version I’ve seen is when the company makes the thinning optional and frames it as a cheaper tier, not a stealth downgrade.
Yeah, and even then it’s only “optional” until they stop stocking the old version and the cheaper tier becomes the default through availability, not choice. The incentive is to normalize the thinner baseline first, then quietly reprice it back up once nobody remembers what “normal” felt like.
Most folks seem to agree this is basically shrinkflation in service/product form: “efficiency” often translates to less human help, tighter policies, and more customer self-serve, and it only lands well when the trade-off is explicit. When companies frame it as a clearly cheaper tier with clear boundaries and a real choice to pay for the fuller experience, customers can accept it because it feels like control rather than a stealth downgrade.
The unresolved caveat is that “optional” tiers have a habit of becoming the only tier over time via availability, and that’s where trust usually takes the hit and the later price creep feels especially bad. Practical takeaway: if you’re a customer, assume the baseline will drift thinner unless you actively choose and reward the version you want (or switch), and if you’re a company, the safest path is transparent tiering with the full option kept genuinely accessible.
“Optional” always turns into “weirdly hard to find” once the warehouses stop replenishing the old SKU. Then six months later the thinner one is “standard” and the price is right back where it started, just with less product. I’ve watched the same thing happen with software plans at work — nobody kills the old tier on paper, they just make procurement jump through hoops until people give up.
The ugly part is when “optional” is only optional on paper.
If the base tier keeps losing support quality, that is a forced upsell with nicer branding.
Yeah the “optional tier becomes the default” thing is the part that feels the most gross to me — it’s like they move the checkout line to self-serve and then act surprised when people miss having a cashier. Transparent tiering is fine, but once the “full” version gets hidden behind friction or limited availability it stops being a choice and just turns into trust tax.
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