How is it that Easter seems to have the highest concentration of bad candy? Weird! In honor of Easters past and future, here is my homage to all the bad candy out there: MARSHMALLOW PEEPS – some people love these things, I just can’t stand them. I’ve never been a marshmallow fan to begin with, but even plain marshmallows are better than these! They’re cute but, it’s just too much sugar for me. I do have a Peep bunny beanbag, tho – in yellow. CANDY CORN – this perennial Halloween candy has its followers, but I am not one of them. I could never figure out why they called it candy CORN; it doesn’t taste like corn at all. If it’s fresh it’s not bad because it’s still kinda soft, but most of the time when I grabbed a piece or two it had been sitting in a dish for who knows how long. Blech. CANDY EGGS (?) – What ARE these things, anyway? They had a hard candy shell surrounding something like a marshmallow, and they were in every single Easter basket I got as a kid. I never knew what these things were called, other than disappointing. CANDY HEARTS – I used to chow down on these Valentine candies, but I seem to have become intolerant to chalk-flavored sugar in my old age. CANDY NECKLACES – Any kind of clothing or accessories in sugar form doesn’t appeal to me at all. Bracelets, necklaces, fruit roll-up underwear…yeesh. HARD TACK CANDIES – You know, the kind grandma always had sitting in a glass dish. If the bag they’d come from was just opened, then you were safe. Straight-out-of-the-bag weren’t bad for a quick sugar rush, but their tendency to clump together (especially after sitting for a long time) made these things more decorative than edible. JELLY BEANS – I actually like Jelly Belly brand jellybeans, but the original sugary ones we’d see at Easter never really appealed to me much. I don’t know how Jelly Belly gets those specific flavors, but the "recipe" booklet they come with is friggin brilliant. It makes perfect sense that they’d be the company to produce the Harry Potter version of the jellybean: Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans. They don’t make the vomit-flavored bean anymore (thankfully?), but just how DO they make grass and earwax-flavored beans? Amazing. PEANUT BUTTER KISSES – These are some of the most disgusting things ever! Like globs of wax that smell a little like bad peanut butter. Eeewwww. BIT O HONEY – put these into the same category as the Peanut Butter Kisses. Yuck. CIRCUS PEANUTS – Another disgusting abomination of the humble marshmallow! They don’t really look like peanuts, they certainly don’t taste like peanuts, and they sure as heck don’t smell like peanuts. In fact, the smell alone is criminal. RIBBON CANDY – I never understood why these things were made in the first place. I guess candy makers of old had to start somewhere, but I’m surprised these have lasted as long as they have. Ribbon candy has the same problem of clumping that the Hard Tack candies have, and as such is generally avoided. :p
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A while back I was asked at a mall if I’d be interested in taking part in a survey about frozen meals. Not frozen pizza rolls or other similar snacks, but actual frozen meals like lasagna and such. I don’t buy these very often – I’m more of a snack food junkie than a proper meal planner – but I guess I’d bought enough of them in the past that I qualified to look at some boxes and answer questions about them.
No big deal, I don’t mind doing surveys – I used to conduct these myself, so I know how it can be hard to get someone to agree to do it. It’s not as hard as sales, but it’s no walk in the park, either. Anyway, I accompanied this guy back to the survey office and into a cubicle where he proceeded to show me some boxes of frozen dinners, and asked me questions about what I thought of them: Which of these two dinners is more appealing? Why is that? Which dinner would you be more likely to purchase? Why is that? And so on. Those are the kinds of questions you expect to get (it’s like a script they have to follow), but my answer to that “more likely to purchase” question completely stumped the guy conducting the survey. I said I wouldn’t buy either of them. So he went back to a previous question – where I said Dinner B was more appealing. I pointed out that yes, the box showing Dinner B looked more appealing, but that didn’t matter to me when it came time to buy anything; I still wouldn’t buy either one of them. After going back and forth on this a couple of times, he finally asked me why. My answer was pretty straightforward: I didn’t like the product. It wasn’t the brand, and it wasn’t the packaging. It was the item INSIDE THE BOX. The frozen meal he was showing me was something I’d never buy in a million years – like eggplant parmesan or something equally gross. I simply wouldn’t buy that particular meal, EVER, no matter how appealing the packaging was. I must have been this poor guy’s worst nightmare come true, because the interview went even further downhill after that. Clearly frustrated, he continued to try and figure out why the Dinner B wasn’t appealing enough to make me want to buy it. At one point I told him flat out that differences in packaging didn’t matter to me, even if the item was one I had bought before – price was actually more important. He didn’t like that answer at all. It got really uncomfortable when he practically asked me straight out to just pick one and SAY I’d buy it, even if I really wouldn’t. It was just a survey; it was not like the world was going to come to an end if I agreed to this little white lie. Unfortunately I have this “honest” streak in me and that suggestion gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. I’ve also conducted these things myself and what he suggested went against the idea of holding surveys in the first place. The whole point of market research is to get honest opinions so the product can be improved. Finding out what is good or bad about the packaging is just one aspect. If the public doesn’t like the product itself then the manufacturer needs to know that, too. Saying I’d buy it even if I never would… well, I just couldn’t do it. Needless to say our time together didn’t last long after that. I felt bad for the guy; he was just trying to do his job, and I wasn’t making it easy for him. It wasn’t like I was deliberately trying to make it difficult; I was just offering my honest opinion. But my answers were outside of what he was used to, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the response that some companies have to the data that market research provides. |
AuthorDonna Davis Archives
December 2019
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