The Dollar Store: Where Failed Products Go to Die
Plus: Pre-OSHA Factory Tours, Costa Rican Phlegm, and Mole!
I’ve had some gastro thing for days and my foot pain started up again, both of which kept me cranky and within limping distance of my house this weekend rather than to our town’s Holiday Festival of the Arts, which I go to every year despite the same acts (senior cloggers, overly-earnest folk duos) and the same stuff (airbrushed horse art, personalized wooden spatulas) and I’m bitching to myself how fat I am, which I am NOT too enlightened to do, and which I respond to by cooking and eating more using the excuse that the days are four hours long now and I need the fat to hibernate like every lumbering animal who’s ever graced a Nat Geo special.
Tonight was Southern-style Squash Casserole (in which I rendered a vegetable unrecognizable by adding a wheel of cheddar, a box of crushed Trader Joe’s Multigrain Crackers, eggs and cream of mushroom soup,) chicken topped with Dona Maria Mole, and Seeds of Change Quinoa and Brown Rice, all of which are the last things my lactose-intolerant gastro system needs, but at this point it’s 5:28 p.m. and feels like 10 p.m., so fuck it.
I felt like I had to get something substantial done before my streaming show du jour—which lately has been 30 Rock—which, trust me, ages very well, and Tina Fey is the sultan of snark— so I decided to work on next year’s monthly budget, because I just received a notice that our 2026 Social Security payments were increasing a whopping 2.8 percent, about a tenth of how much everything is going up, but we boomers deserve it for sucking the teat of generations after us by only paying about 300 bucks total in Social Security taxes. Just kidding! You motherfuckers can “OK, Boomer” us all you want—we got here first, and we’re taking it all!
One of the categories that really jumped was food and cleaning products. Which leads me to places like Dollar Tree—or what used to be Dollar Tree, but changing the sign to Dollar Twenty-Five, Dollar Fifty and Dollar Seventy-Five Tree would cost so much they’d have to change it to Two Dollar Tree. Which actually, would be a much more cost-effective change, so they should just look toward the future and go for it.
Joke for future comedy show at an assisted living community: I’m so old I’ve been going to the dollar store since everything was a dollar! Hey, I know it’s lame, but those old folks don’t get out very often and can’t be picky about entertainment—which is why I would be the perfect act for them!
Dollar stores used to only have products that were sold at regular stores and were either discontinued or overstock, but now there’s a whole slew of freakishly-named stuff that’s made especially for them. And they turn out not to be a great deal when you compare the per-ounce cost with regular stores—of course this brilliant wrink uses her phone calculator at Dollar Tree! You can always buy a shitty one right there, but it only works with prime numbers. I’ll cover that off-brand weirdness in a future post, but for now, here’s a few dollar store items that just didn’t make the cut at mainstream stores.
I am an absolute soup nut. I even have a home movie of six-year-old me doing a soup commercial, utilizing the method overacting of those in the single digits that can only be appreciated by parents. My dad would buy soups by the case from his distributor friends on the Lower East Side, and I would devour them, undiluted, then hide the empty cans under my bed, as if no one would notice they were missing. Such is the not-yet-devious-enough brain of a young punk-in-training.
Campbell's has created some wonderful soups over my lifetime, like Noodles and Ground Beef, which no one remembers but me. It disappeared after a few glorious years, and I was the only one at its funeral. But even I, a lover of all food unhealthy and Southern, would stay a country mile away from Campbell’s County Style Sausage Gravy. It is a soup? Is it a gravy? The whole thing looks as gray as a winter’s day in the Cotswolds (which is why Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are moving back to California, or so I hear.)
And Spicy Buffalo-Style Cream of Chicken? Even using the correct punctuation of a dash between two modifiers, which Campbell failed to do on its County Style Sausage, won’t get me past that creepy white firewall on the can. Cheddar Cheesy Noodles? I fear the fun graphics and zany lettering are hiding something sinister, and an online reviewer agrees with me: Even using milk per instructions, it just tastes like weird tasting water. And it’s kinda metallic. There’s no cheese flavor to it. It’s like someone forgot what cheese tastes like. It’s gross.
Next up is Cotton candy-flavored Wyler’s Light. Even if I had cotton mouth, I wouldn’t drink this crap, and I love cotton candy. But the point of cotton candy is texture. You know, mouth feel. Or as one company who makes cotton candy puts it, You can taste the happiness! Well, you can taste the despair in this drink. It goes down like a marriage that was over 40 years ago, only neither one of you has the money or energy to move out and there’s no way you’ll share custody of the dog. And pink. It tastes like the pink of a scratchy tulle tutu mom makes you wear because she wants you to take ballet lessons so you’ll be less klutzy only all you want to do is catch a raccoon and make it your friend. That’s way too much baggage for one shitty sugar-free drink.
I love chocolate. When I was in Costa Rica years ago, I visited a cacao farm. I thought I was about to enter heaven until I tasted the raw fruit of the plant—the white pulp that surrounds the beans. It looks like a cross between rotting teeth, mushrooms, and phlegm and tasted like a mélange of those things with a pinch of mango. And the pre-roasted beans tasted like Sour Patch Kids that were stuffed in a drawer back when my pubic hair was still black.
I’d rather remember my childhood visit to the Hershey factory back when they gave walking tours of the actual factory, pre-OSHA. When you were a Kiss away from deadly machinery, and could sneak a finger into a vat of chocolate when no one was looking. At the tour’s end, I walked into the gift shop, and saw a 10-pound Hershey Bar. Nothing else in the world mattered but that bar and my parents had to pry me off the thing while I was screaming. No way could they afford ten bucks just to shut me up, although if you ask my husband, he’ll tell you that’s a damn good deal.
So, while not my favorite candies, I wouldn’t toss Junior Mints and Tootsie Rolls out of bed. After all, they are chocolate-adjacent. So when I saw Junior Mints and Tootsie Roll hot cocoa flavors I was almost going to buy them, but at $1.50 a box, I didn’t want to blow all my Substack research budget at once. But I did buy D. a box of Junior Mints and put it in his Christmas stocking, so I took a few, reglued the box with spit, and tossed the candies into a cup of Swiss Miss. The Junior Mints didn’t melt fully, and it tasted like I was drinking hot chocolate with toothpaste marshmallows.
When Snapple first came out, I had to do live radio ads during which I tasted various flavors. I sampled Kiwi Strawberry, forced myself to swallow it, and managed to choke out, “Snapple Kiwi Strawberry—it’s an acquired taste!” I love strawberries. And I love kiwi, but it goes with absolutely nothing. I was reminded of this after buying a pack of Trident Watermelon Twist at the Dollar Store. It's part of Trident's Twist collection, with the idea of mixing fruity and tangy flavors, but the result tastes like rye bread. With caraway seeds. The good news is, the flavor doesn’t last that long. Which reminds me of the joke about two old Jewish ladies in a restaurant. The first says, “this soup is terrible!” and the other says, “and the portions are so small!” Anyway, now I sort of understand why Google A.I. described Trident Watermelon Twist as A yoga-infused, fresh take on watermelon!
It's getting late, I'm still as cranky as I was at the beginning of this post, my foot is only marginally better, and my gastro thing hasn't improved with another heaping portion of chicken mole, so I’ll just truncate this by telling you that Dots are the quintessential gumdrops. Gumdrops should NOT be fucking sour; even lemon and lime Dots just taste yellow and green, not sour. That’s why Lemonade Dots sucked and I wasted a buck-fifty. Well, I didn’t totally waste the money because it’s candy, and candy has sugar, and hyper wrinks need their sugar, so I ate the whole sucky, sour box.
I’m going to limp off to bed now, holding my stomach, and drown my sorrows in a few four-packs of Nik-L-Nip Elf Punch. Salud!
How can you be an involved Wrink and keep me working in this literary sweatshop for free?
Like this post below—if you like it, that is!
Leave a comment below —I’ll cry if you think this post sucks, but I respect honesty!
Re-stack or share this post so others can know the joy of being suckered into spending a few minutes reading the shit I write.
Become a free subscriber—following is like living together, subscribing is like being married—only you don’t need a lawyer to unsubscribe.
Your column is a thing of beauty. You have found a tone that is difficult to pull off, and yet, pull it off you do, with great aplomb. I love this week's examination of processed horror.
Thanks for the Dollar Store reviews. Very helpful. And the great line—“disappeared after few glorious years, and I was the only one at its funeral”.
Hershey’s yuck! Flavored with butryic acid, high on sugar, low on cocoa, what’s to like?