4 fucking gummy bears…
Companies don’t announce that everything is getting worse. We encounter it four gummy bears at a time.
I was a little peckish, so I went digging through the giant bowl of leftover Halloween candy and found a little packet of Haribo Goldbears.
Perfect! Gummy bears. Love these.
I ripped it open.
There were four gummy bears inside.
Four.
One, two, three, four.
Nothing captures the state of America quite like a bag of four fucking gummy bears.
Not an empty bag and not a defective bag. A product that had passed through research, pricing, packaging, quality control, and several meetings before someone decided: yes, four fucking gummy bears. Ship it!
You pay the same (or more) and receive less. The packaging remains while the contents quietly disappear. The ingredients get cheaper, it gets smaller, it gets worse.
I recently saw a company selling “OG” Swedish Fish: candy made to resemble the version people remember, when they used ingredients. We’ve reached the point where “made the way it used to be made” is not a description, it’s a premium product category.
Companies hollow things out gradually. We don’t receive one big announcement that everything is getting worse. We encounter it four gummy bears at a time.
I ate them. They were gone immediately.
