You’re welcome and encouraged to look into it yourself. You misunderstand what I’m saying and draw further conclusions based on that, though, so I can see why it doesn’t make sense. I’ll take a stab at explaining.

I did mean surface area, not thickness. As volume decreases, so do the dimensions of the object. The thickness of the plastic is already negligible and any change within that plane is a fraction of that, so even less pertinent here. The remaining two planes of the exterior, being several orders of magnitude larger, do experience functionally significant, easily measured change. Those two planes as they relate to volume are most succinctly explained as surface area.

I mentioned the SA:V change to illustrate that this size change isn’t visually apparent, so it’s important to adjust the volume via the dimple. This maintains a steady milk level so jugs can hold an entire gallon in the winter and ensures customers don’t think jugs are underfilled in the summer. In cold weather, the dimensions of the jugs reduce less than 1%, which means visually the change is difficult to notice, but the volume changes a fair amount, around 5%. A change in size imperceptible to most reduces the volume of the jug by about 1/20 without compensation*.

• This is how manufacturers can so easily fly under the radar with shrinkflation. It’s hard to see, especially since they use shapes that obfuscate these changes, but they’re easy to calculate.