Cars, grocery stores and everyday products seem to be getting smaller. In India, Tata has introduced the 310-centimeter Nano car.

We live in an incredible shrinking age. The economy, newspapers, businesses and paychecks are all getting smaller. But not all downsizing is bad. Size may still matter, but these days it seems that small can have a greater impact. After decades of being driven by the urge to acquire something bigger and better, the small, the efficient and the uncomplicated may be what helps people avoid the next big bloat.

So, tiny is back in a big way, and in India, it comes on four dinner-plate-size wheels. The Tata Nano, a compact car that sells for about $2,000, is the shortest (310 centimeters) four-passenger car on sale in India, wrote The Times’s Heather Timmons. Producing small cars with fuel-efficient engines is now the auto industry’s goal, one that Chrysler hopes to learn from Fiat, its prospective owner.

Grocery stores are also shrinking. The idea is to lure time-starved shoppers who do not want to pay high prices and wander long grocery aisles, wrote The Times’s Andrew Martin. The biggest push in such stores is coming from the British retailer Tesco, but discounters like Lidl and Aldi, both German chains, have been spreading in Europe and the United States.

“The average person goes shopping for 22 minutes,”Phil Lempert, who edits Supermarketguru.com, a Web site that tracks retail trends, told Mr. Martin.“You can’t see 30,000 or 40,000 products. We are moving into an era when people want less assortment.”

It’s not only the stores that are shrinking, but also their products. The American obsession with supersizing has given way to “short-sizing,”wrote Mr. Martin. Aiming to offset increased ingredient and transportation costs, some food manufacturers have been reducing the size of packages like cereal, chips and chocolate bars.

More companies are cutting down on packaging to address environmental concerns as well, wrote The Times’s Claudia H. Deutsch. Wal-Mart has been pushing its 66,000 vendors to get rid of excess packaging, Ms. Deutsch wrote. Products will have less shrink wrap, cardboard and plastics.

And less paper, too. Sotheby’s and Christie’s catalogs were once“behemoths, running to hundreds of pages and stuffed with foldout images and scholarly essays,”wrote The Times’s Carol Vogel. Now, the auction houses are cutting back to make their catalogs thinner and smaller. And for the spring sales, Sotheby’s clients received a USB stick no bigger than a credit card, an eversion of the catalog, wrote Ms. Vogel.

Fewer pages mean fewer words, and that is the trend in the world of text messages, Facebook status updates and the microblogging service called Twitter, where 140 characters or less is the rule. Because character count matters on these sites, tools like URL shorteners have been soaring in popularity, wrote The Times’s Jenna Wortham. Services like TinyURL.com and Bit.ly, which abbreviate unwieldy Web addresses into bite-size links, are expanding their businesses based on everyone’s penchant for, well, shrinking.

“Brevity’s the soul of wit, right?”Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, told The Times’s Maureen Dowd, quoting Shakespeare.

Apparently, a lot of things can be condensed. Maureen Evans of Northern Ireland tweets recipes, compressing ingredients, actions and temperatures to the“utmost richness, density and clarity,” wrote The Times’s Lawrence Downes.“A dish, a meal, a trip to deliciousness magically packed into the tiniest carry-on bag.”

And these days, one small one is really all we can have.