PB&Gone

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

I have this running game that I’m playing with the guy in charge of ordering at the grocery store.

The game: I buy two boxes of Peanut Butter Cookie Crisp each week, and he keeps the Peanut Butter Cookie Crisp coming.

I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up, but …

My fear is that PBCC – as us fans of the cereal refer to it in our own insular shorthand – will soon go the way of the Italian chicken sandwich that they introduced at Burger King a few years back.

You don’t remember the sandwich? They gave it a lot of fanfare, advertised it all over the TV, got me hooked to it, and then … it was gone.

Apparently, it didn’t sell well enough to keep it coming.

This has happened, oh, how many hundred times over the years?

Just when you get to liking something, they yank it away from you.

The TV industry is the worst about doing that. You can get “Family Matters” for years on end, but when it comes to “TV Nation,” what do they do when it tanks in the ratings for a few episodes?

Did they emphasize Crackers the Corporate Crime-Fighting Chicken the way the execs at ABC played up Steve Urkel?

Oh, no-o-o. They dropped it like Michael Moore dropping a salad fork.

Soft-drink makers are the same way. Remember Crystal Pepsi from a hundred years ago? It’s as gone as the New Coke.

Meanwhile, that Dr. Wells stuff that makes you wonder if that Wells guy should be investigated for plagiarism, his concoction tastes so much like Dr. Pepper, is alive and well.

(And don’t get me started about Mr. Pibb. I’ll just say that I’m glad they rescinded his degree. Ripoff.)

Which gets me back to Peanut Butter Cookie Crisp – which is the most ambrosia-like breakfast cereal of all time.

Seriously, when we die and go to heaven, this is what they will be serving in the morning.

But in the here and now, I’m sure it doesn’t have that much of a shelf life to look forward to.

My guess is that I’ll be stuck out of luck in a week or two.

Honestly, every time I go to the grocery store, I expect it to be long gone.

Question: How long can you keep cereal before it goes bad?

I know, I know – I’m desperate.

 

Chris Graham’s Stop the Presses column appears on this blog on Tuesdays and Fridays. For more on Chris Graham’s humor columns and other fiction writing, visit www.authorchrisgraham.com.