"You Sit On A Throne Of Lies!"

Saw this today at my local Schnucks grocery store today— ELF cereal, based on the Will Ferrell movie. 

Timely! That movie came out in 2003, so good job rushing the cereal to the shelves there, guys!

I'm assuming there must have been some sort of likeness rights issue here, since Buddy The Elf's face is depicted in silhouette, and Will Ferrell's image doesn't appear anywhere on the box.

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!

Monster Cereals Are Back!

This Fall Target's bringing scary back! Just in time for Halloween, they're releasing ALL the General Mills Nonster Cereals in special retro packaging!

As a graphic designer it's great to see these old-school designs back on the shelves. Makes me feel like a kid again.

Actually I never ate these cereals very often. I've always liked the characters more than I ever liked the actual cereal. Something about the way the marshmallow bits got all slimy when coated with milk was very off-putting to me.

Target didn't just bring back the main triumvirate of Monster Cereals, no-siree! Hold onto something-- they're bringing back two old discontinued favorites: Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy! Can you believe it?

Fruit Brute left store shelves way back in 1982, but it's making its triumphant return this fall! At long last you'll finally be able to accurately recreate your Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction cosplay outfits.

Yummy Mummy's back as well! It hasn't been seen on store shelves since it was discontinued in 1992. Finally you'll be able to relive the night you sat shoveling spoonfuls of Yummy Mummy into your mouth while you watched Marissa Tomei win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for My Cousin Vinny!

I'm glad Target is releasing the original package designs instead of the new over-rendered, faux 3D abominations. Look at those god awful things! Just glancing at them gives me a headache. Only a Philistine would prefer those versions.

These old school retro Monster Cereals are available for a limited time at Target. By the way, for those of you who are wondering, these are just reproductions of the original boxes. They're not thirty year old boxes of cereal that Target found in an abandoned warehouse they acquired in a buyout. At least I don't think they'd try something like that... no, I'm sure it's all brand new. Yes, pretty sure. Reasonably sure. You know what, you might want to check the expiration date, just to be safe.

The Shrink-O-Tron Strikes Again: Kellogg's Crunchy Nut Cereal

So I stagger bleary-eyed into the kitchen early this morning and start fixing my breakfast. And of course by "fixing my breakfast" I mean "pouring cereal into a bowl" as I sit and shovel it into my mouth while trying to figure out where the hell I am and why I'm up and eating at 6 am.

My favorite cereal this week (it changes on a regular basis) is Kellogg's Crunchy Nut Golden Honey Nut Flakes. There're nuts in every bite, if you can believe the box.

The bad news is that there wasn't quite enough cereal in the old box to fill the bowl. The good news is that I had another box all ready and waiting in the bullpen.

As I poured cereal from the newly opened box, I noticed something... different about it. Something didn't feel quite right.

I immediately dug the old box out of the trash and compared the two. Even at the ungodly hour of 6 am, my instincts were right-- the dreaded Shrink-O-Tron has struck my beloved Crunchy Nut Golden Honey Nut Flakes!

Those brigands at Kellogg's have reduced the contents from 14.1 ounces down to 13.2. Almost an entire ounce less! Son of a...

Naturally Kellogg's only used the Shrink-O-Tron on the contents of the box. They didn't use it on the price of course, which remains firmly the same.

Not only did they reduce the amount of cereal inside, they shrank the box as well. That's the new box on the left in the photo above. It's now visibly narrower than it was just a couple of weeks ago.

It would not surprise me if the box looked like this in a couple of months. 

When is this crap going to end? When will companies stop with this sneaky underhanded tactic and just raise the price of the goddamned box? Why can't they just level with us and say, "Look guys, we're very sorry but due to increased production costs we're going to have to raise the price of the cereal by a few cents. We'll try not to do it again for a year or so." If they did that then consumers nationwide would understand and say, "Well that sounds just fine."

But no. Instead of raising the price they keep it the same and give us less product. And they surreptitiously put it in a smaller box, hoping we're all too enamored with the Royal Baby to notice. It's sneaky, sleazy and underhanded. It's something Communists would do. Are you all Commies up there in Battle Creek, Kellogg's? 

Well screw you, Kellogg's. Screw you and the horse your batch*t insane, enema-loving founder rode in on!