![]() I realize that a next-day comment on the ole EGD will draw about as many readers as a message in a bottle delivered directly to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. While I would never be so brash as to suggest those two events are somehow connected, cause and effect, I like to think I was part of the chorus of complaint that prompted the company to reverse its folly. To be frank, I'm sorry I brought it up.Įditor's note: Six months after this post, Celestial Seasonings announced it was returning to the old box. And for me, I guess, a triple shock, because I also feel bad that I bothered to tell you about it. These changes are a double minor shock: first you feel bad that they happened, then you feel even worse for feeling bad they happened, for being that small and nostalgic a person. "Whatever gramps," they'll say, not even looking up from their electronic devices, taking all their nutrition in the form of a thick beige liquid sucked from a catheter tube. Someday there will be Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Pot Brew and 30 other sub-varieties and I'll point out that it used to be just one, plain old Sleepytime tea, to my grandchildren who will shrug. ![]() Companies have to evolve to stay in business. To marketers, we 55 and older might as well be dead, except for a nether world of adult undergarments and denture creams and such. Yes, I realize the carnival of indignity that is aging, that the world is not skewed in your direction anymore and the stuff you care about is revealed as irrelevant idiocy. Maybe that's what goes in the empty space on the lower shelf. But still.sometimes you've just gotta have it.Īs I gazed over the profusion of Chexes (that sounds wrong "Chex" must be both singular and plural, like "fish") I realized, to my horror, that they had chocolate and vanilla, cinnamon and clusters, even something called "Honey Nut." Everything but Wheat. And a generous bowl of Wheat Chex and skim milk tops out at about 500 calories, more than a jumbo donut. I almost never eat breakfast cereal: it's really fattening and leaves you hungry. But eventually I stopped buying the latter two because they just aren't as good. When I was growing up, Chex came in three varieties: Wheat, Corn and Rice, the wheat in smaller boxes, because it is denser, more concentrated than Rice or Corn. One aisle over from the revolution in tealand, I looked for Wheat Chex. As long as the old standby is still readily available.īrand extensions must work on others, because companies push them enough. It's fine to shake it up, sell Ritz's in odd holiday shapes. I have a certain loyalty - Heinz ketchup not Hunts, Ritz crackers, not whatever pale rip-off imitation the store is trying to fob off on you. Tea is a comfort beverage-you don't amp yourself up on tea and then hit the town-and a comfort beverage should be comforting. I buy cans of expensive loose Twinings Earl Grey tea and not some cheaper Earl Grey because I'm confident that the stuff is what I've always been drinking, and if they dubbed it EG Classic and made the box neon blue, to not be confused with EG Proustian Lime and EG Morning Blast or whatever, I would be off put. Or maybe, I realized grimly, i t is time to look for a new evening tea. "That seems like work," my wife said, dubiously. I floated the idea of keeping them, and just refilling from the new, blanker boxes. Sighing, we stocked up on a few of the old boxes. That's the idea behind brand extension: try to use a name you love to leverage you into buying something you don't want, plus a ploy to block out more shelf space at supermarkets. A glimpse online shows all sorts of even more rococo Sleepytime permutations: Sleepytime Echniacea Complete Care and Sleepytime Decaf Berry Pomegranate and Sleepytime Sinus Soother. It is now "Classic Sleepytime" to differentiate from all the other brand extensions, vanilla (bleh) and peach (double bleh) and honey (for those too busy to dip a spoon in actual honey and put it in the damn tea ourselves).Ĭelestial Seasonings must have known people would be dubious, because "Fresh New Look" is flagged in red on the upper left of the box to tip you off that you aren't hallucinating, and aren't buying little paper baglets of chemicals, but the same blend of chamomile and spearmint, lemongrass and tilia flowers, blackberry leaves and orange blossoms that made up the herbal tea (but no actual tea, as my family learned when we toured the Celestial Seasonings plant in Boulder, for the simple reason there isn't any tea in it).Įxcept if you buy "Sleepytime Extra," which contains Valerian root, a folk sedative. The new boxes are less cluttered, the word "Sleepytime" and the bear bigger, shorn of extraneous imagery.
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