Thursday, March 26, 2009

Cereal

Yesterday evening in Waitrose I was buying oats, one of the constituent elements of my world-beating muesli. While doing so, I took the opportunity to peruse the other, competing breakfast cereals that are now available. The different brands and varieties are indeed many. But why, I asked myself, is one's choice of packet size so restricted?

Take, for example, Frosties. These are currently sold in only three sizes: large, medium, and individual. But in the latter case, one is obliged to purchase, not just an individual serving of Frosties, but a whole box, or so-called “Variety Pack”, containing little boxettes of Ricicles, Cocopops, and so forth, as well - each sufficient for just a single bowl.

Ridiculous.

If you’re a Frosties Man, you’re a Frosties Man, and nothing else will do. Far better, I think, to sell Extended Family Packs of Frosties, about the size of freight containers. Just one of these could keep you in breakasts for a whole year. As an added bonus, you'd only have to collect the one packet top in order to qualify for your free bathroom towel. (Or maybe collect five, and get a free bathroom.) Similarly, whereas a medium packet of Frosties only has one little plastic Tony The Tiger inside, an Extended Family Pack could accommodate a whole, genuine tiger. It might protest a little, of course, if you poured it into a bowl, doused it with whole fat milk, and then unknowingly bit into its tail, but at least the overall breakfast experience would become a tad more exciting.

At the other end of the spectrum, I feel more variety in size should be offered, too. Bulimic fashion models, for example, often find it a lot of hassle having to throw up an entire serving of Frosties every morning. For them, Kellogs should sell sachets, each containing just a single, individual Frostie. Someone like Kate Moss could swallow one of these and puke it out into the lavatory in a near simultaneous action, pausing only to snort another line of cocaine from the porcelain.

Then there are particle physicists. For them, Kellogs could sell Frosties that only actually exist at a sub-atomic level. These could then be put into particle accelerators and bombarded with deuterium to create anti-Frosties. When a sufficient mass of anti-Frostie met a similar mass of Frostie, energy equivalent to the birth of the universe would be created, thus freeing Mankind from its dependence on fossil fuels.

It therefore makes sense to have a wide variety of packet sizes.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Frosties are just Cornflakes withdelusions of grandeur.

Joe Slavko said...

No, on the contrary. Cornflakes are aspiring Frosties. They are what Frosties would be if only they had the looks, talent, and personality.

Anonymous said...

Is there class struggle within cereals?Are some inherently more bourgoise and revisionist than others?Try new Garibaldi flakes.Now with added proletarianism!

Anonymous said...

Joe, excuse the interruption, but would you mind telling your mate, Ron Broxted, that I'm worried about his MyT blogs being deleted today. Not a single plod mention either. Thank you. Nice blog btw. Janus

Anonymous said...

Does this mean you were getting your oats in Waitrose? Cant be bad.

Joe Slavko said...

One meets a better class of oat than in competing supermarkets.