The furniture retailer Malouf sells beds and bedding in a fraction of the colours it did a few years ago. Newell Brands, the Sharpie maker, has retired 50 types of Yankee Candle. Coca-Cola offers half as many drinks.

Covid slashed consumer choices as companies pared their offerings to ease clogs in the supply chain. The logistical mess is behind them. But many of the choices aren’t coming back.

Retailers and suppliers across industries—from groceries to health, beauty and furniture—have said that it didn’t pay to offer products for everyone, and consumers didn’t care that much when they stopped.

“Today, people would rather lose a portion of consumer demand as opposed to spending extra on too much variety,” said Inna Kuznetsova, chief executive officer of ToolsGroup, a supply-chain planning and optimisation company.

Macy’s president and CEO-elect, Tony Spring, told analysts in November that “the customer today does not want an endless aisle.”

New items made up about 2% of products in stores in 2023 across categories such as beauty, footwear and toys, down from 5% of items in 2019, according to the market-research firm Circana. Shelf Engine, a technology company that automates ordering for grocery retailers, said large grocery stores have reduced fresh-food offerings such as fruit, dairy products and deli meats by 15% to 20%.

Large grocers cutting back on choice is a reversal from pre pandemic days, when they believed they had to carry everything to avoid losing customers to the store across the street, said Stefan Kalb, CEO of Shelf Engine.

Kalb said that grocers are now saving money because they have fewer items to manage and that the slimming of product options is reducing food waste.

Executives at consumer-product companies said the thinning of their product lines has been a relief for those struggling to improve profitability in the midst of higher interest rates and rising costs for raw materials and labor. They said many of the reductions have been in lines that consumers wouldn’t notice, such as items in special packaging and assortments for specific big-box retailers. The cutbacks are also to product lines that drown consumers in options.

“I don’t think any consumer would have noticed we went from 200 to 150” types of Yankee Candle, said Chris Peterson, chief executive of Newell Brands.

Some industry specialists said the new focus on bestselling items has reduced innovation and hurt smaller brands that rely on retailers’ desire to carry something for everyone.

“There has definitely been less innovation since the pandemic,” said Seth Goldman, a founder of the organic-beverage maker Honest Tea, which was bought by Coca-Cola in 2011 and discontinued in 2022.

Coca-Cola over the past few years reduced its brands to 200 from 400, cutting slow-growing as well as declining products, including small regional lines such as Northern Neck Ginger Ale and national brands such as its first diet cola, Tab.

“It was pruning the garden to let the better plants grow,” Coca-Cola Chief Executive James Quincey said in 2022.

Goldman said there was still demand for Honest Tea, even if it wasn’t big enough for Coca-Cola. In September 2022, four months after Coca-Cola’s announcement, he launched Just Ice Tea, a drink that he said is similar to Honest Tea and that is expected to have sales in 2023 of more than $16 million.

Companies began winnowing product lines in the years leading up to the pandemic as a corrective to previous decades when consumer choice ballooned. That was partly because of the internet, where online retailers weren’t constrained by the space limitations of physical stores, giving rise to the term “endless aisle.”

The cuts were turbocharged in 2020 and 2021, when product shortages and a surge in consumer spending led companies to give priority to the most in-demand items. They focused on products that ran fastest on production lines and, because of social distancing in factories, could be made with automated machinery.

Kimberly-Clark cut more than 70% of its toilet paper and facial-tissue products over a single weekend in 2020 as it rushed to satisfy a fourfold increase in demand, said Tamera Fenske, the company’s chief supply chain officer.

Fenske said the company jettisoned slow-selling items as well as many of the special counts and custom sizes it made for individual retailers. Fenske said that, as pandemic restrictions eased, Kimberly-Clark was able to be more thoughtful about the items it brought back. She said the company carries about 30% fewer product lines in North America than it had at the start of 2020.

PVH, which owns Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, embarked in 2020 on a plan to cut more than a fifth of its offerings to focus on what it calls “hero” products—those that make up an essential part of someone’s wardrobe.

Some companies said the culling of less-popular products opened up space for new lines.

Georgia-Pacific stopped selling 164-sheet rolls of Quilted Northern toilet paper because its larger rolls were better for consumers who valued longer-lasting rolls, said Kim Burns, senior vice president of supply chain for Georgia-Pacific’s consumer products group. Burns said the company has subsequently invested more time and money in new product lines, such as toilet paper with a scented tube that acts as a bathroom air freshener.

For other companies, the supply-chain shock provided a real-life experiment in how trimming product lines could improve productivity without hurting customer satisfaction. “It was quite shocking as we parsed it out to see we were using a lot of our buying power to really not get much of a return on investment,” said Nick Jensen, vice president of product at Malouf.

The Logan, Utah-based furniture company has reduced its lines to about 3,500 product choices, down from almost 11,000 items before the pandemic. Jensen said the company is adding new items more carefully these days.

“If we have 15 different colours and three shades of grey, it’s a paralysing choice,” Jensen said. “It’s kind of forced us to be much more intentional versus throwing a lot of things at the wall and hoping that they stick.”

—Suzanne Kapner contributed to this article.

SEOUL—Food prices have risen so much that Kim Soo-yeon has developed a suspicious new habit at the grocery store. She has taken to shaking bags of her favourite brands of potato chips to see if they feel lighter.

“If companies are reducing the amount of food by unnoticeable amounts, it feels deceptive,” said the 32-year-old office worker in Seoul.

South Korean authorities will soon be backing her up in the supermarket aisles.

Seeking to temper the effects of inflation, many countries have sought to use political pressure to dissuade food makers from gouging consumers—with higher prices or lower volumes. South Korea is taking things a step further.

Starting next year, the country will require companies to disclose on their packages and websites when grocery items drop in volume, but not price. To ensure firms comply, South Korea is establishing a dedicated price-investigation team to monitor any fluctuations. Officials are considering levying fines, too.

South Korea’s muscular response to “shrinkflation” reflects how a sluggish economy—its projected full-year growth of 1.4% is roughly half that of other wealthy countries—has become a major problem for President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose approval ratings remain stuck in the mid-30s. Those unhappy with Yoon most commonly cite economic issues.

The new proposals to fight shrinkflation came as the government unveiled an initial list of violators. Following a monthlong investigation, authorities said the offerings of everything from beer to Vienna sausages to dumplings had quietly gotten smaller. Some 16 variants of flavoured almonds had shrunk, too.

Choi Si-yeon, a 28-year-old office worker, said she was angry when she found out about what had happened with her favorite wasabi-flavored almonds. Each bag contained 20 grams less, a seemingly undetectable amount.

“If they had raised the price, at least some consumers would notice,” Choi said.

The maker of the snack, a South Korean firm called HBAF, for Healthy But Awesome Flavors, said it had disclosed the product-size changes on its website. The firm pointed to the pandemic, a rise in labor costs and almond prices as factors.

Other companies also claimed to have made online disclosures or argued the slimmed-down offerings were part of flavour revamps.

Shrinkflation backlash has emerged elsewhere, too. France’s second-largest supermarket chain, Carrefour, has put up bright orange signs to highlight products it deems subject to shrinkflation since September. In the U.S., Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) recently issued a report on shrinkflation, citing facial tissues and Oreos as examples.

With costs rising, what is often lacking is transparency over potential changes, creating room for a sense of injustice when shrinkflation occurs, said Rajiv Biswas, chief economist for the Asia-Pacific region at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “Consumers can’t check the website of hundreds of products,” he said.

Headline inflation in South Korea topped out at 6.3% in July 2022 from the prior year, below the recent peaks of 9.1% in the U.S. and 11.1% in the U.K. But food prices in the East Asian country had remained relatively low for decades, so the recent upticks have triggered outsize anger. Wages haven’t kept pace with rising prices. The country’s housing market—the main source of wealth for many South Koreans—has stagnated.

A majority of South Koreans plan to spend less money next year, according to a recent poll, with nearly half of respondents citing inflation as the chief reason.

Low inflation had been a particular policy priority for South Korea over the decades, helping the country’s export-heavy economy maintain a good environment for private investment, said Randall Jones, a former senior official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development who led the group’s economic reports on South Korea.

“People aren’t used to inflation in South Korea,” said Jones, who is now a distinguished fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

South Korea is conducting daily price checks for more than two dozen staple items such as milk and ramen noodles. The country’s antitrust regulator will list any shrinkflation examples on a newly created website and will handle enforcement of the new measures. The government wants to ink agreements with large South Korean retailers to build a joint monitoring system for some 10,000 everyday items.

That sliced cheese and other inexpensive items were among the first named shrinkflation violators irks people like Lee Hyun-woo, a 23-year-old university student. “If even processed food is shrinking, I feel betrayed,” Lee said.

In recent weeks, the country’s shrinkflation suspicions have touched everything from the cubed white radish accompanying Korean fried chicken to the cream density of a slice of strawberry cake.

Kim Young-hee, a 42-year-old homemaker, is glad about more government transparency. But the extra knowledge likely won’t change her habits, such as her occasional purchase of honey-butter almonds for her children.

“I’ll still buy the almonds,” Kim said, “but I don’t want to be tricked.”

A new kind of present is gaining acceptance this holiday season. More consumers are picking secondhand items to gift each other, finding it to be an environmentally and budget-friendly option.

Thrift stores that sell used clothes and goods are springing up online and on street corners. Goodwill Industries International, the nonprofit behind the familiar chain of thrift stores, is ramping up its online efforts. Fashion brands are developing their own resale offering to keep up with clothing-reseller sites such as Depop and Poshmark. Roughly 17% of gifts this holiday season will be a resold item, according to software firm Salesforce.

“Consumers are choosing resale first because of the incredible value, the unique merchandise, and the incredible sustainability benefit,” said Matt Kaness, chief executive of GoodwillFinds, the nonprofit’s online e-commerce platform run in partnership with Salesforce.

Secondhand clothes, once seen as frumpy and embarrassing, are now keenly sought out by the fashion conscious. A popular vintage aesthetic dovetails with consumer calls for goods that do less harm to the world. About 85% of American shoppers have bought or sold preowned items over the past year, nearly a third for the first time, according to online marketplace OfferUp’s Recommerce report. In apparel alone, some 10% of the global market will be secondhand by next year.

GoodwillFinds is the only major nonprofit player in resale.

GoodwillFinds’ online platform allows a smarter operation than the traditional bricks-and-mortar store, said Kaness, formerly an executive with retailers including Walmart and Urban Outfitters. The platform uses artificial intelligence and large data sets to more accurately price and categorise items, creating a much more efficient system, Kaness said.

“In a store, it’s a human looking at the item. They have paper sticker tickets for the price and they have to process such a volume that it is somewhat random,” he said. In contrast, the company’s online system uses computer vision to take a picture, identify the item, create a listing and price it.

Moving online is the logical choice for secondhand sellers, said 25-year-old Brooke Bowlin, who runs lifestyle blog Nuance Required. “Secondhand stores just can’t sell enough,” said Bowlin, who started her own thrift store in Siloam Springs, Ark. “By moving online and expanding the audience, there is an opportunity to re-home more clothes,” she said.

Major fashion brands are also increasingly recognising that secondhand is as much a necessity as it is an opportunity. The fashion industry is responsible for up to 8% of global emissions, relying on resource-intensive raw materials and fast-moving trends that have contributed large amounts of waste. Around 11.3 million tons of textile waste go to landfills in the U.S. every year, according to environmental organisation Earth.Org.

Outdoor-clothing retailer Patagonia established its Worn Wear platform in 2017, one of the first resale channels by a major brand.

As much as adapting to trends, Patagonia Worn Wear aims to change consumer behaviour, said Asha Agrawal, managing director of the Patagonia venture fund that runs the platform.

“A lot of our messaging is around—‘you don’t need to buy something new,’” she said.

Worn Wear buys back used brand gear from consumers by paying higher prices than peer-to-peer apps or other marketplaces, Agrawal said. This strategy contributes to the bulk of the platform’s costs but also boosted its inventory fourfold this year alone, she said, adding Worn Wear has been profitable for the last two years.

Worn Wear is now integrated into the Patagonia brand. “You can now do your main shopping with Patagonia with our resale business in the U.S.,” she said. “That’s a huge evolution for us.”

Resale by brands and third parties is expected to outpace traditional thrift sales and donations in the U.S., rising to 60% of a $70 billion total by 2027 from 15% of the $20 billion secondhand market in 2017, according to online thrift store ThredUp’s recent resale report.

Other fashion players have their versions. Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz launched H&M Pre-Loved in the U.S. this year, in partnership with ThredUp. Inditex-owned Zara has launched a preowned platform that offers repair services, customer-to-customer sales and donations of used garments in the U.K. and France, with plans for a U.S. rollout by 2025.

Resale remains an imperative for fashion brands as a way to control distribution and retain the trust of shoppers increasingly alert to the fate of their old clothes. However, scaling up resale generates a raft of operational challenges such as authentication, returns and ensuring that secondhand doesn’t look like an afterthought, said Anita Balchandani, fashion lead at consultant firm McKinsey & Co.

Unlike nonprofits, such as Goodwill, that get their inventory from donations and don’t have to be accountable to shareholders, retailers are struggling to make business sense of resales, Balchandani said.

“No one has proven the path to scaling this up profitably,” she said. “You almost have to create a whole new end-to-end supply chain…. The retailer who cracks that journey is going to make a real difference in this space.”