Old Man Yells at Snacks

When the going gets tough, the entitled class gets blamey and sanctimonious.

On Super Bowl Sunday, President Joe Biden delivered a message regarding one of the gravest matters ever put before him: shrinking bags of Doritos.

In a 48-second video, POTUS assured the world he would end the scourge of ‘shrinkflation.’ “It’s a ripoff,” he said in a clip carefully edited to conceal his own cerebral cortical shrinkage. 

Justin Trudeau is also on the case. He recently issued a sternly worded letter to Big Grocery: “Large chains are making record profits. Those profits should not be made on the backs of people who are struggling to feed their families,” he soberly intoned, right before committing billions of recently printed dollars to Ukraine to protect its LGBTQ war amputees from climate change or something.

Even Cookie Monster weighed in…

Cookie Monster say: “Re-elect Comrade Biden! He double cookie ration!”

Thank you Trudeau, Biden, Cookie Monster and the rest of the ruling class for having our backs, for browbeating Galen Weston and shaming the sneaky capitalists of BlackRock wholly owned subsidiaries. We feel so much better now. 

Also:

Seriously, guys—this is embarrassing. Cynical people–which I guess includes me–know a political smokescreen when we see it. We also know…

• lousy fiscal management created the problem of soaring grocery bills in the first place

• the lousy fiscal managers a) shop at Whole Foods and b) secretly think the poors are fatties who could do with less junk food…

• shrinkflation is a rational decision to compensate for higher input costs by downsizing products

• neither POTUS nor Trudeau Nepo Fontleroy III even shop for themselves…

Perhaps our ruling class knows that we know all this. They might also suspect the issue isn’t landing entirely because most of us think we could use 12 percent less Cadbury cream egg and 17 percent fewer Pringles. So they’re now determined to tackle real problems like ending wars, preventing currency crashes and clearing sidewalks in major cities of junkies, psychotics and criminals. 

LOL. JK! They’re cracking down on TikTok.

The video-sharing app has been under scrutiny in Canada for months. In the US, Congress is demanding China-owned ByteDance divest or face deplatforming. TikTok, we’re told, is like a digital Socrates that corrupts our youth and also steals our data, both of which are true. It certainly induces all manner of insane behaviour, from ‘blackout’ challenges to cooking chicken in NyQuil. 

Coincidentally, TikTok is where people lament the shrinking value of their dollars, from larcenous restaurant and grocery bills to the indignity of a tip button on an oil change. It’s also where people sound off on Toronto’s hellacious rental and housing market. 

A prime example—viewed and shared thousands of times—was this video of an unfathomably cramped “two-bedroom”, which blogTO described as “next-level horrific.” Notice how developers slapped in a partition wall dividing one bedroom into two, leaving the apartment with almost zero closet space and no spot for a sofa. Nonetheless, in what you would generously call the living room, a stager made a valiant attempt to create such a space…

There’s nothing ‘shrinking’ about the price: $600-k along with $425 in monthly fees and $2k annually in property taxes…parking not included

TikTok’s ‘economic despair’ genre has a subgenre: miserable zoomers. While the supply of these testimonials is endless, the theme is the same—lousy pay, crushing cost of living, never getting ahead. In a post with +1.5 million views, TikTokker Abbie Ferrell asks:

Does anyone else feel like they worked their ass off for the last three or four years to get a college degree and now you have a job you hate and you still can’t afford life and you’re still fucking miserable and you can’t live in a house and you just feel lied to, because you thought that if you just went to college and got a degree you'd be able to afford a house?

The reaction to these agonized pleas of ‘uncle’ has been scolding ‘pull up your bootstraps’ lectures from entitled boomers. 

Zoomer TikTok: All I do is work yet I can’t afford to live.

Boomers: Stop ordering DoorDash! That manicure and those highlights look expensive!

Avocado toast! That’s what got them into this mess! If only they’d read The Wealthy Barber! I kinda feel like we’re past all that now. Also, boomers, be careful what you wish for. Belt-tightening is fine—I’m one-half Scottish!—but hairdressers, manicurists and Doordashers have to make a living too.

Is this what what we want? A world in which all non-essentials have been scrimped out of existence? What happens to a city when you cut out the hairdressers, the manicurists, the cabbies, along with all the restaurants? You end up with ghetto streets of vape shops, tattoo parlours and Money-Marts. Oh, wait. That’s already happening.

Assuming they live to see it, the most entitled generation in history won’t like it when civic life turns into a joyless, shrunken existence in which standards keep shrinking, wherein we accept smaller homes, longer work hours for less pay, spending less time with friends and family. That’s the shrinkflation our boomerish political class doesn’t want to talk about.