OK, not the tissues, per se.
But at some point this year, Kimberly-Clark decided to make the tall, roughly 280-count boxes of tissues I’ve bought since time immemorial … extinct, apparently.
Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t spend all my life blowing my nose or wiping away tears or picking up messes. But … I don’t like it when a company messes with my routines and makes me change out tissue boxes more often in various places around the house.
I have no clue why they did this, but all of a sudden, within a few weeks or months time, at every store I went to, they had just … vanished. Replaced in most stores by more house-brand rougher-on-nose tissues.
I was miffed enough to try to reach them through social media. Posted a note and evrything, and … no reply at all. (Maybe I’ll try the 800 no. on the bottom of the box – what, only weekdays 8a-4p CT? – if only to ask the logical question … why? A paper shortage? Slow sales?)
Ever have something you’ve bought as long as you remember, a daily staple of life just … vanish without a word? It’s ridiculous.
Another grand example – white sauce powdered mix (not the yucky canned stuff). Deb uses it for the sauce for a recipe we call ‘Eggs on a Cloud,’ a yummy dish from McCall’s Cooking School, a series of colorful recipe sheets and binder series from about the time we got married in the early ’80s.
For a long time, no problem finding them. Now, go ahead, check the sauce aisle. Hey Knorr, where the heck do you keep the stuff now? Or did you stop making it in favor of the fifth variant of teriyaki, BBQ or other sauces/gravies?
Little things, to be sure. But they add up, I tell you!
I guess it’s sort of like the notion that just when you really fall in love with a TV show, they cancel it.
And don’t get me started about The Beatles and a decade (the ’70s) or two wasted waiting for ‘the next Beatles.” When we knew well and good there wouldn’t be one.
(Now there’s a left turn in conversation eh? Well that’s just the way I think;-)
Leave it to Barney 
Andy Rooney – so glad to see that your are really still alive.
LOL, well yeah, that’s a particularly Rooney-esque string of thoughts. If it rings a bell with folks, fine, if not… oh well, hope they at least get a chuckle out of it.
Sigh… They did almost the same with the shampoo we have used for 15 years. They “improved” it according to the label. But now it separates into a pasty jel that doesn’t work. Progress.. eh..
I sometimes think, as I enter a convenience (? is it a convenience) store or grocery and now even drugstores (as I remember them, not pharmacies) that there have been for too many years too many “choices”. I remember mom and dad stores (and we still have Bruno’s in Bend) where you went for “little” things you may run out of. Graduate to the above mentioned convenience stores that carry high priced “because you need them” . One day a few things, the next day comparison shopping, the next day competition brand and coupon shopping. It is affecting everyone and everything. I believe the supply and demand has come to a whole new way of life and eventually all the “stores” will get worse because the competition will become too much. We will go back to where it began; 2 choices, cheap and cheaper. Look at some of the European stores where the economy has taken them to what they can afford….none or cheapes available.
Knowing you are a man of intelligence and take extreme care in your wording, I want to reply with an equally thought-out rebuttal to your comments. I by no means wish to trample on your opinions or act as though I am better informed than you, but I am willing to argue quite vehemently in favor of the applicability of the economic laws of supply and demand. Clearly you have become a victim of too little demand, and a resultant lack of supply. Now don’t go thinking I assume you spend your life blowing your nose or wiping away tears or picking up messes. I think that’s a mistake many people make when judging a person’s character. And it’s something I have had to deal with for years myself. But I find it erroneous, and even a bit naive of you, to view yourself as the center of corporate scheme to throw off-balance your everyday living routine. While the idea of Kimberly-Clark attempting to insert chaos into your life, causing your life to spiral into a mess of negative circumstances, I find more plausible that you are an anomaly of society who still prefers the 280-count boxes of Kleenex brand tissues. Which, could in itself be an even larger cultural conspiracy targeted at you, but that is a squabble for another. I sincerely hope you do not take my comments lightly, and you consider them as a part of on ongoing effort that all humans should be making to turn themselves into a better person.
Thank you for your time and for sharing your thoughts.
I was only speaking in an attempt at humor, not “the world is out to get me,” Tarvaris. And funny enough, a couple stores here DO still carry the big boxes of Kleenex, so clearly it was a decision by Kroger/Fred Meyer to clear more shelf space for their own house brands. Totally within their rights.
I wish I could find a regular band-aid like we had in the old days. They had band-aids that were one inch wide. I can’t find them anymore.