We’re gonna slow it down and go a little old school this week. This is the sort of thing Complaint of the Week was when it started. I’d take a piece of current culture, way overvalue it, and weep for the end of civilization. Today you might know it as the Glenn Beck approach.
HOOO-AH!!!
Ahem…anyway.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a popular candy bar is concerned that its market share is slipping and wants to innovate its product to ensure that no further erosion take place. Their solution: make it like an energy drink!
Wait…that can’t be—
Nope. I’m right.
Both Snickers (with their “Charged” bar) and now Butterfinger (with its “Buzz” bar) have looked to the stars for salvation and received this message: people want “as much as caffeine as the leading energy drink” (as trumpeted by Butterfinger Buzz). And they want it in a form that cannot only damage their heart (you do know caffeine is a drug, right?), but also help them further their goals of obesity and diabetes!
Do I overstate things? Sure…it is me, after all. An occasional candy bar is not going to make any of us fat or destroy our bodies’ ability to process sugar properly. Caffeine needs to be taken in fairly high doses for a pretty protracted length of time to do damage of any kind, nevermind the kind I referenced above. (Of course, we don’t tend to do anything “occasionally” except, perhaps, not have our marriages end in divorce, but, for the sake of argument…). Still, do you really want to trust any product that warns off those who are pregnant or may become pregnant? You know that’s what they say about cigarettes too, right?
And more to the point, why? Who is this product for? The Red Bull junky who really needs a candy bar, but only has enough for his typical six pack a day habit? The chocoholic who’s always wanted more than just a sugar rush? I’m all for completely irresponsible food products (the fried oreo, anyone?), but really? Do we really lack enough avenues to get caffeine and sugar into our bodies these days that we need to have introduce a candy bar that can do both? What does it say about us as a people that that caffeine chocolate provides is fine, but not really enough, you know? In New England, walking in any one direction for approximately a mile guarantees you will hit a Dunkin Donuts, a Starbucks, or a convenience store of some kind and probably at least two of those three. I imagine it’s not all that different in the populated portions of the United States (sorry North Dakota). Can we really not take the time to but a caffeine product—might I recommend Cherry Coke Zero, a delightful concoction—and a candy bar? Or, I don’t know, maybe just settle on one of the two. Maybe we don’t need both? At least not simultaneously?
I long to return to the simpler times of my youth. The days when we had products like Go-gurt, Butterfinger Milk, Pop Tarts Cereal, McDonald’s Pizza, and Bubble Yum Soda. You know… $#!+ that made sense.