There is a small handwritten card taped next to the register at my neighborhood ice cream counter explaining that a scoop costs more than it did in the spring. Cream is up. Wages are up. The card is maybe forty words long. I read it twice, bought the scoop anyway, and then spent the walk home thinking about the six client conversations I have had this month that were all secretly about that card.
June CPI came in yesterday at 9.1 percent. Highest print in forty years. Every consumer brand I work with is either raising prices right now or hiding a raise inside a smaller package and hoping nobody owns a kitchen scale.
The hiding is the part that worries me.
Shrinkflation is a price increase that refuses to admit it is one. You keep the number on the shelf and quietly take the ounces out of the bag. It works beautifully until one person photographs the old package next to the new one, and in that moment you are no longer a brand with rising input costs. You are a brand that assumed its customers could not count.
A price increase is not a finance decision that marketing gets handed to clean up. It is a positioning statement, and your customers will write one on your behalf if you decline to write it yourself.
What separates the increases people forgive from the ones they punish is not the size of the number. It is whether the reason survives being repeated by someone who does not work for you.
So name the actual cost. Not market conditions, not headwinds, not the phrase unprecedented environment. Say aluminum. Say freight. Say we pay our packing crew more than we did last year and we are not taking that back. Patagonia has spent a decade telling people what a jacket costs to make, so when a jacket costs more the explanation is already sitting in the customer's head. Costco keeps the hot dog at a dollar fifty and everyone knows that too. Both are stories. Both travel without a media budget.
Then keep the number in daylight. Print it, email it, put it on the shelf tag before anyone discovers it at checkout. Surprise is the tax you pay for staying quiet.
And do not apologize. An apology tells people the price is a mistake you might reverse if they complain loudly enough, which guarantees that they will. Explain instead. Explanation treats them as adults. Apology invites a negotiation you cannot win.
It is whether the reason survives being repeated by someone who does not work for you.
Truffles and Barnaby have watched the cost of their preferred wet food climb three separate times since February. They have filed no complaint, offered no feedback, and eaten every bite. I would love a customer base like that. Nobody has one.