The skimpflation era
We’ve been hearing all about trends to look forward to in 2022 lately, but there’s one unfortunate trend that, like Covid-19, has developed and persisted over the past two years and shows no signs of going away anytime soon. “Skimpflation” (a term coined by Greg Rosalsky of NPR last year) refers to the erosion of quality and customer service related to rising costs and inflation. While shrinkflation occurs when companies cut back on the size or quantity of their products while charging the same price, skimpflation better describes the situation we’re seeing now: we’re paying the same amount (or more) for services as we did three years ago, but they’re not as good as they used to be.
For most of us, evidence of skimpflation is impossible to ignore. We experience it every day in our personal lives, whether it’s being put on hold for hours on the phone, waiting longer for food deliveries, or seeing a reduction in the quality of services provided, like cold cereal at a hotel that used to serve hot breakfast. And we’re experiencing it in our professional lives as well. In the past several months, we have found ourselves waiting days or weeks to hear back from vendors on the status of an order. We’ve been told that we need to take our orders of plastic pots, supplies, and fertilizer months early or risk losing them to someone else, when, in the past, an order that we placed a year ago would have been secured for us until our scheduled delivery date. We’ve received shipments of liners that were unrooted and covered in rust or mold, some of which arrived on wooden racks that were structurally unstable and collapsing on the truck.
But, on top of all of this, perhaps the worst part of skimpflation for us has been the growing sense that we should come to expect this type of service. As the months wear on and businesses continue to struggle with a lack of labor and rising costs, subpar customer service and slow response times are becoming the norm, not the exception.
To be clear, we don’t mean to minimize the extent to which businesses are struggling right now. We too have felt the pain caused by supply chain and labor shortages and witnessed the strain it’s put on our existing workforce. We’ve found ourselves working longer hours than usual in an industry already known for long hours, and we have struggled at times to manage the intense levels of burnout that our industry has faced over the past two years.
But if we had to identify one positive outcome of the Skimpflation Era, it may be that it’s helped us to identify who our true partners are in this industry. When we look back over the past couple of years, a few of our vendors have stood out above the rest because they have refused to lower their standards for quality and customer service, even in the most difficult times, and we will not soon forget this. When we look back on this challenging period of time in our history (hopefully in the not-too-distant future) we hope you’ll find that we have upheld our standards for you in the same way. Over the past thirty years, we have built our reputation on providing consistent quality and service, and the last two seasons were no exception. At the end of the day, we aspire to be not just a vendor, but a partner that you can trust and rely on through the good times and the bad.
