👁 Bulkflation, Normalizing Airpods, and the SEC Forecasts a Climate Ruling

I’m a Florida Man. Not the “wraslin’-alligators, all-hopped-up-on-crystal-meth” kind of Florida Man. But the “I grew up in Florida and have thin blood” sort. I’ve spent the past two weeks in the cold and it has made my skin very dry. And it turns out, skin is also inside your nose. Who knew? So now I have an unfortunate affliction of cracked skin inside my nose. The pain, the agony. You use your nose a lot, it would seem, and I’ve never been more aware of my nose than I am now. 

I popped into a Duane Reade (a Walgreens, for those not in NYC) for some travel-sized tissues, saline spray, and a ChapStick, to soothe my aching nose-holes. The total for my visit? $15.50 — due to bulkflation.

We’ve all heard of shrinkflation - the term used when brands sell you less for the same money. Packages get marginally smaller, or the contents inside are a scant less than usual. This happens in times of poor economic factors; the last time we saw shrinkflation at scale was during the 2008 housing crisis and subsequent recession.

But this is something different. In today’s economic environment, Duane Reade no longer sells a single packet of travel-sized tissues. Instead, they have a bulk package with 8 small travel-sized tissues in the package, individually wrapped, but not available for individual sale. The same story with the Saline spray — it’s bogo, but twice as expensive as usual, and obligates me to get two instead of one. ChapStick? Fuggidaboutit; I had to buy three in order to cop just one. They’re all name-brands, too. No house brand whitelabel shenanigans. The margins just aren’t there. 

I asked a store employee why they don’t sell small travel-sized individual items. “We stopped that a few weeks ago. You can only buy the big ones now” was his reply. Another employee said, “yeah it’s all this inflation s***”. 

What I experienced at Duane Reade is a manifestation of what I’m calling bulkflation: selling smaller-priced items in kits and bulk, in an effort to hide the rising costs of those products. In the case of the tissues, buying in smaller packages has always had a convenience cost associated. Rather than $0.03 per tissue from a larger package you’d expect to pay $0.05 or $0.07 apiece. But with this bulk-travel-sized option, you get the worst of both worlds: higher cost per piece ($0.11) AND the requirement of buying more than you reasonably need. 

As we weather inflation, this type of tactic will be required to offset the uncertainty of costs that retailers have. In managing rising fuel costs, Jetblue is canceling flights, Uber and Instacart have added fuel surcharges. And then there’s the cost of packaged goods themselves, which are only getting more expensive as the price of labor and raw materials get more expensive and more scarce.

One way to combat this as a consumer is to be more prepared and thereby spend less. Mine was a cost of convenience; had I thought to bring tissues, ChapStik, and nasal spray on this trip I wouldn’t have written this piece. But it’s a lesson that this Florida Man won’t soon forget.

Convenience has a price, and in 2022, that price is (much) higher than it used to be. 

— Phillip