This Week In Odd Supermarket Sightings

A couple of years ago I went on one of my patented, crowd-pleasing rants about Big Cereal's insidious new practice of surreptitiously shrinking their product boxes while keeping the price the same.

I specifically called out Kellogg's for aiming their Shrink-O-Tron ray at their Crunchy Nut cereal, reducing it by almost a full ounce while leaving the price at an inflated $3.99 or whatever it cost.

Wiseacre that I am, I quipped that if left unchecked, we'd eventually see ridiculously thin boxes of cereal like the one on the right here.

Looks like my little joke was frighteningly prescient. Take a look at this suspiciously narrow box of cereal I spotted in the wild on my latest expedition to the grocery. It's a good two inches narrower than its neighbors on either side. If it gets any narrower it's gonna be hard for it to stand upright without assistance.

I have no doubt that this svelte new box holds significantly less than the previous version did, while costing exactly the same (if not more).

I was right about the boxes getting thinner in the future— I was just wrong about the direction.

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I also recently spotted this at my local grocery— yes, we now live in a world in which it's possible to buy muffin tops, sans the boring, less delicious and disposable bottoms. Just like in the 1997 The Muffin Tops episode of Seinfeld.

All will hail and pay homage to our new prophet and seer, Elaine Benes!