Your Halloween candy is falling victim to a ghoulish shriek-flation

Halloween candy is playing a trick with its treats.This year, mini-sized candies are getting even smaller, and parents filling their bowls on October 31 may be getting less bang for their buck.The shrink-flation — or “shriek-flation,” in honor of spooky season — that’s already come for fast food and soda is also hitting candy companies like Mars Wrigley and Hershey, leaving some of their most popular bags of sweets looking a little skinnier.The internet is choc-a-block with Reddit posts tracing the ever-shrinking sugar highs, with photos of a 1991 Mars bar that tipped the scales at 65 grams, compared to just 51 grams today.Or take a 61.2-gram 1980s Snickers bar, which looks positively prehistoric compared to its 52.7-gram present-day counterpart.More recent examples abound, too: This past summer, a retail worker reported that Hershey’s removed over 5 ounces of candy from its party-size bag of dark chocolate snacks.

The shrinkage comes as Halloween candy costs have climbed 71% since 2021 — nearly triple the national inflation rate during that period, according to a recent FinanceBuzz study.Shrinkflation expert and ConsumerWorld.org contributor Edgar Dworsky, who has noticed this product weight loss since his teens, blamed the downsizing offense on various factors.“Part of it has to do just with the increased costs that manufacturers face,” Dworsky, a former Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General who has been a consumer advocate for nearly 50 years, told The Post.

“They have higher shipping costs, higher raw material costs.”Indeed, the cost of producing confections soared 87.6% between 2019 and 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.Dworsky didn’t discount corporate sleight of hand either, noting that customers are more sensitive to price increases than size changes.“They’re not going to remember, ‘Oh, did this package have 160 little fun-size bars in there or did it have 205?'” he remarked.But which confections have expe...