This is an opinion column.

I walked into a Piggly Wiggly in Alabama a few weeks ago, and I swear to Nick Saban I thought I’d been drugged.

It was like every item on the condiment aisle had been stolen by aliens and replaced with an exact duplicate. Exact but smaller. I stumbled on, aisle after aisle, and it seemed everything was mini.

I took photos to send to my wife, just to ask if I was imagining the whole thing. But it didn’t help. When so much on the shelf is pocket sized, a picture of the shelf just looks like a shelf.

The truth is I began to doubt my sanity, my reality. How could such a switch happen? How long would it take? Did they always sell pickles in caper jars and Worcestershire sauce in bottles small enough to pack in carry-on baggage?

Where was the outrage? I could not imagine an America that would simply stroll by all that systematic shrinkflation and quietly pay more for less.

Unless we’ve all been outsmarted.

That’s what I thought about when I read a series of stories called The Hunger Games, about greed and instances of starvation in nursing homes across America. It was written by my colleagues across Advance Local, with help from academics and data analysts.

It’s an exhaustive and meticulous look at many nursing home owners who game the system for profit. It is about deceptions and cutbacks, especially when it comes to the food, or lack of it, served to many residents. There’s an image in those stories I can’t get out of my head. Of a hungry resident staring down at a plate that holds one solitary ravioli.

Eat up, grandma.

We’re shrinkflationing our golden agers, for sure. But there’s more to it than that. More than watching nursing home owners scam residents with smaller portions and cheaper cuts. They’re scamming us all. Because it’s clear that some of them – the worst of them, of course, but there are plenty – for years have bled the budgets of their care facilities to make them look like money pits, only to stash money in seemingly untouchable sister companies.

Read: How some nursing homes funnel cash to sister companies

All so they can whine to the government – and to the ravioli eaters’ children – that they need more federal money to provide better care. Even if, in a recent five-year period, more than a third of Medicare money sent to nursing homes ended up at sister companies.

Read: Some nursing homes feed residents on less than $10 a day. Is anyone watching?

The sharks have gone mainstream, and three-card monte is a corporate strategy.

This is not, let me be clear, a summary or synopsis of that nursing home project. It is far too involved for this type of simplification. But it’s a reasonable takeaway. It is the gut feeling that has become all too common in a society that values profits over, well, parents.

We rail about cutting waste in government, about defunding the regulators. And turn a blind eye to those who hide from regulations. We deify those who become wealthy on the backs of the people in their care and the tax money meant to assure them a better life. Surely they must be … smart.

So if an 80-year-old has to eat a solo ravioli for dinner, so be it. If your grandmother has to live on $10 of food a day, as many do, well times are tough all over. And if a guy chokes to death on a chunk of meat because there weren’t enough nursing home staffers left to cut it up? Well, he had a good life. Probably.

It’s outrageous. And it’s as American as a shelf full of tiny pickle jars or a slightly smaller bag of slightly smaller dog treats.

Smart business, right? Or something else.

It’s a multi-billion-dollar game of ‘Whac-A-Mole,’ as one state official in Jersey put it.

And “greed is at the heart of the problem.”

You think?

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.