It can be subtle. Consider what has happened with Banquet TV dinners.
Banquet's dinners have been a dollar for many years. But in that time, the sizes have gradually decreased. The variety of foods changed too, always for the cheaper. Once upon a time, the chicken dinner had three pieces, peas and a good amount of potato. Then it dropped to two pieces. Then the peas changed to carrots... and then to carrots and peas. Then the chicken dinner was eliminated completely, replaced by something called 'chicken nuggets' which tastes about as much like chicken as a fish stick does.
Across the board, the dinners kept getting smaller and crappier.
In October, Banquet eliminated all but two of its normal TV dinners, replacing them with other dinners in smaller boxes that boldly announced what great deals they were even though they sell for more. Some brag that they have 25% more food! (But they're 33% more expensive.) Others rave about their organic content. One says that the breaded patty is bigger. My favorite is the one that says it has "RIB-SHAPED PATTIES." Huh? Come again? They're rib SHAPED??
None of them brag about the new higher price.
I headed off to California for a while where I mostly ate hospital food. Yum. When I returned, my supermarket no longer carried the two $1.00 varieties of Banquet dinner at all.
So that's how inflation works. Higher prices for meals that aren't that much bigger. The same price for dinners that are smaller than they used to be. Cat food instead of actual pieces of chicken. And nice, pretty boxes that brag about how low sodium or organic the food is - as if a person who's only spending one dollar for his dinner actually cares whether it's healthy.
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