Batman Taffy!

I am Vengeance. I am the Night. I am…really, really hard to chew.

When you think of Batman, you probably think about a couple of things. A pretty good movie from 2008, or an even better one from 1989. A fantastic animated series in the ‘90s, and a cheesy - yet wholly entertaining - live-action program from the 1960s. You might think Frank Miller, or “Arkham City,” or even Joel Schumacher, but the one thing you probably wouldn’t EVER equate with the Caped Crusader would be taffy. Well, thanks to America’s absolute finest retailer of surplus goods and potentially lethal foodstuffs, the Dark Knight and hardly chewable candies will forever be interconnected notions.

Strolling down the aisles of the local Dollar Tree, I observed this set of nine - count ‘em, NINE - sealed candies, which is remarkable for two primary reasons. First and foremost, that’s an absolute shit ton of candy for just a dollar, and I’ll be several shades of darned if the artwork on the packages wasn’t half-way awesome-looking. And for four measly quarters, you bet your sweet derrière that I’ll take a gamble on a sugary comestible that has the Scarecrow’s face on it.

So, I plopped down my two dollars (that’s right, I bought two of these sets, just in case I felt the need to devour a solid pound of artificially flavored things on the ride home) and decided to review each individual candy. Why, you might ask? Because…well, honestly, I don’t know. You gotta’ do something in between periods during NHL games, I guess.

Not surprisingly, the two pieces of candy that caught me attention first were the two “mystery flavors” with the Joker’s face plastered on them. Since the set consists primarily of characters seen in Nolan’s second Bat-movie, I’m thinking that, perhaps, this thing was initially released to capitalize on the success of “The Dark Knight.” By extent, this also means that the candies themselves would be almost five years old now, but come on…it’s not like the Dollar Tree ever sells products past their expiration dates or anything.

As far as the “mystery” here is concerned, I’ve got little to say. The first one tasted a lot like bubble gum, while the second piece of taffy tasted like really, really sharp bubble gum. Seriously, the textures here are an absolute Russian roulette game for your gum line; sometimes, you get soft and squishy, and other times, you get what appears to be a knife painted strawberry pink. With that in mind, I’m beginning to see how the manufacturers of this stuff were so quick to associate the particular candies with a clown-faced mass murderer known for convoluted trickeries.

If I had to pick a favorite out of the set, I would probably go with the Two-Face candies, for one particular reason; they’re the most palatable flavor in the set (blue raspberry, known by all cultures as the greatest of all unnaturally-occurring substances), and they’re blue…therefore, totally different looking than everything else, and therefore, the easiest to pick out in a line-up.

Not that this doesn’t go without saying, but you really are getting a mixed bag here, as far as candy textures and sizes go. Alike chemical-encrusted snowflakes, no two taffy bars appear to be uniform in length, width or height, and frustratingly, they seem to fluctuate wildly in overall texture. Some of the bars are soft and pillowy, and others are basically shivs that you can also eat. Maybe it’s just a commonality among the more villainous bars, perhaps?

The Scarecrow bar had to have my favorite artwork of the set, by far. As far as comestibles targeting children, that’s a pretty freaky mascot to slip on the packaging of a piece of candy; I’m damn near thirty, and even I had to look away from the package while I crammed the item down my throat hole.

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot to say about this one. Umm, it tasted kinda’ like cherry? Well, that’s about it. And also, it was somewhat chewy, and it clings to your bicuspids. Folks, YOU try and find a way to diversify a review of TAFFY. It’s a whole hell of a lot more difficult than it appears, I assure you.

As far as the Bat-branded flavors, we end up getting a LOT of duplicates (but more on those later.) The main, Batman-only flavor is sour apple, which might just be my least favorite, quasi-popular artificial flavor of all-time. I especially hate how they ALWAYS include it in those value-priced “three sets” of Bubble-Yum, where it’s smack dab in between two flavors that are delicious. Methinks its some sort of conspiracy to rid the factory of a surfeit of undesirable product, you know…

So, uh, yeah, the sour apple taffy. It’s green, It’s also really powdery, and true to the nomenclature, quite tart. I guess my favorite thing about this one is that it has Batman on the package, rearing back to cold-cock something. Which is a little fitting, since eating sour-apple flavored things is only slightly more desirable than getting socked in the jaw by a psychopathic JFK, Jr.

Hey, do you like strawberry? Well, you better,  because there are two strawberry flavored bat-treats on board. Peculiarly, both packages feature Batman swinging on a rope, Tarzan-style. That might have some sort of sociocultural significance, but it probably doesn’t.

I like how the taffy in the orange packaging kinda looks like a tumor, or some artificial lung or something. Conversely, the red package taffy looks just like a tongue, which…you know, I’m not even sure, to be honest. I’m reviewing pieces of taffy, for the love of Jehoshaphat; if this isn’t a sign that this perma-winter is driving me crazy, I don’t know what it is.

And two more duplicate flavors to round out the set; another cherry (featuring Batman heroically leaping towards his own emblem) and another blue raspberry (which I can never, ever complain about, of course.) I really like Batman’s completely stoic “action pose” here. It’s almost like he’s saying, “dude, just forget it…just forget it.”

That’s cool how the cherry one doesn’t even look like a thing. The best I can fathom is that’s it’s a picture of Tennessee drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch, or some really hard to wield Medieval lance. And the blue raspberry bar is just blue…as it should be, as nature intended. Batman, surely, would approve of this.

So, there you have it; an absolutely, absurdly in-depth review of a throwaway, 99 cent store product that no one in their right mind would ever care to read so much about. But you know, it’s our civic duty to document this kind of stuff. Can you imagine a world were people never KNEW that blue raspberry Harvey Dents were once mass-marketed, or that last fall, you could spend a human dollar on a garbage bag that sort of resembled a spider? It’s a selfless job, and one without prestige; but as long as surplus, novelty goods keep getting manufactured and hoisted upon lower class America…

…I’ll be waiting in the wings, America. I’ll be waiting in the wings.

Read More

The Legend of the Dollar Tree Giant Lawn Spider!

Presenting the Absolute WORST Thing I Have Ever Spent A Whole Dollar On...

You have to be an unbelievably petty person to complain about losing a stinking dollar on an unwise purchase, but as we all know by now, next to Tom and Richard, I’m pretty much the pettiest person on this planet.

The legend of the “Giant Lawn Spider” begins as so many of my misadventures begin: with me, hanging out at the local Dollar Tree, at 9:00 p.m. on a weekday. It being the Halloween season and all, an absolute ton of All Hallows Eve decorations were on display, ranging from the really crappy (some plastic severed feet and a Styrofoam pumpkin you can practice carving) to the mind-numbingly crappy (think, “bloody” translucent banners that are impossible to nail to the wall and poorly assembled “squishy” bats that fall apart after about five minutes of light handling.)

It was there, amidst all of the Jack O’ Lantern sippy cups and witch stickers and public domain DVDs that I saw it. Right there, next to the cheap-o synthetic spider webbing, and right underneath the light up ghost toy that didn’t light up or really resemble a ghost, for that matter…it was there, staring directly into my pupils. Nay, more like it was gazing into my soul, scouring my conscience for the blackest, bleakest recesses of my humanity. It was the kind of life-shattering, time-displaced moment that one simply cannot shake off nor ignore. I mean, how could any conscionable human, when THIS is within grasping distance?

LOOK AT THIS ABOMINATION OF CAPITALISM. I’ve seen some crappy decorations in my life, but this thing is so unbelievably, unconscionably shoddy that I was left drooling in a state of sheer stupefaction.

You know, I’ve seen a lot of spiders in my day, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one that looked like the bastard offspring of a garbage bag and neon green duct tape before. Calling this thing a facsimile of a spider is sort of like calling a brick Spray-Painted grey a “to-scale model” of the White House. I mean, yeah, it resembles a spider as far as basic geometry is considered, but even then, it’s by the absolute thinnest strand imaginable.

The instructions on the back of the bag are bad, as in, “instruction manual for an Electronic Arts-published game bad.” You get a diagram that loosely explains how one is to assemble the art project, totally glossing over the fact that the consumer ALSO needs to have access to a bunch of shredded newspapers to stuff into the body of the spider to make it look like anything other than a vast pool of electrical tape.

Basically, they want you to tie a couple of sandwich bag twisty-thingies around the head area and and the proverbial arse of the spider (but only AFTER you fill it with whatever debris you deem fit, of course.) Actually, you’re going to need three twist-ties, since you also have to segment the spider in half to make it look like an arachnid as opposed to a deflated kiddie pool.

Before plopping down my hard-earned Washington on this incredible piece of shit, I joked about the final product being nothing more than a plastic garbage bag with eyes painted on to it. And when I finally opened the package, what was there to greet me? A thing that looked suspiciously like a plastic garbage bag with eyes painted on to it.

Really, the only thing that makes this “toy” anything other than a garbage bag that been opened on both ends are the glowing, lime-hued eyes of the spider. I think it’s safe to say that without those, this thing would be a living, breathing FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection nightmare. And in case you’re wondering? Yes, of course this thing was made in China. It HAD to be made in China, and you know that.

What you’re staring at here are the “tendrils” of the spider. You may be saying to yourself, “wow, Jimbo, those things look more like nondescript slivers of black plastic than insect appendages!” and you know what? You would be right, and hard. Shit, these guys can’t even rip you off in a full three-dimensions, for crying out loud!

To be fair, though, the manufacturers at LEAST had the decency to throw in a few complimentary sandwich bag twist tie thingies. Well, more like they gave you A sandwich bag twist tie thingy, as you had to individual rip off pieces of this one long-ass twist tie for your three vital enclosure spots.

And after a week of amassing disposable print literature that nobody would miss, THIS is what I ended up with. Alike Charlie Brown’s piss-poor Christmas tree, I think I’ve officially uncovered the Halloween decoration equivalent of a dead sapling in a potted vase.

There really isn’t an excuse for this thing. Yeah, I guess it would look a little bit more “in place” if it were buried underneath a mound of auburn and gold leaves, but even then…shit, man. Just shit. There’s no way you can make anything stand erect with those floppy, thinner-than-spaghetti “legs” and if you’re somehow able to jerry-rig the prop so it does, you sir, ought to be out building bridges for the UN or something instead.

To add insult to injury, the final product didn’t even resemble the right goddamn insect, more closely looking like a mosquito than a Black Widow. “Giant Lawn Spider,” my ass, because there’s no way anybody can get this the thing to look like anything other than a “Mediocre Carpet Termite,” I attest.

Is there any saving grace to be found here at all? I guess you could say that it would make for a great conversation starter, but every time someone sees it, they just think it’s a freaking garbage bag left out in the den. I guess you could sprawl it out in front of the fireplace like some sort of ironic bearskin rug or something, but inside humor of the sort only goes so far. In hindsight, I would’ve been better served spending my one dollar bill on an oxidized nickel.

Really, what more can be said about this stupid thing? The fact that I was even able to stretch this thing out into a 1,000 plus word essay is a minor triumph of human nature, because I think most Pulitzer Prize winners wouldn’t be able to muster more than three sentences on the utter irrelevancy of the product. It’s not just shameless, it’s glaringly, eye-searingly shameless, a prop that wallows in its own inherent shittiness like a naked mole rat or something. Even for 100 pennies, I feel like I was molested as a consumer; it’s quite possibly the single worst thing I’ve ever spent legal tender on, and as god as my witness?

 I swear I’m going to keep this thing on display all year round at Casa de Internet Is In America.

Read More

My Dollar Tree Shopping Spree Bonanza!

Featuring bizarre Chinese toys, books from five years ago that nobody read, several food items being sold past their expiration dates and totally out-of-place commentary on the exploitation of impoverished consumers!

I have what you could consider a  “love/hate” relationship with the Dollar Tree. On the positive side of things, there are the occasional moments where I need AAA batteries and a pouch of grape Big League Chew at  8 P.M., and being able to purchase said items with only a handful of dimes and quarters is unquestionably a pretty great feeling. Now, as far as the things I don’t like about the store: everything else.

The neighborhood Dollar Tree is far and away the most depressing locale in any town in America. In fact, just having one seems to create this seismic effect where everything within a 200 foot radius of the building is a cone of human misery. No joke; in college, whenever I was feeling unmotivated, I would just stroll down the aisles of the nearest Dollar Tree - after seeing the 20 year olds with EBT cards, the cashiers with blackened eyes and at least two or three homeless individuals just hanging out in the parking lot, I guarantee you my ass got all sorts of motivated come homework time.

The Dollar Tree has become something of a cultural whipping boy, that go-to-insta-joke whenever someone wants to mock the poor and the disadvantaged. In the process, that means people tend to overlook the fact that the Dollar Tree is a multi-billion dollar a year, Fortune 500 company listed on the NASDAQ 100, with a 2009 net income that’s staggeringly fatter than those fostered by more “reputable” companies, including Sears and Whole Foods Market.

Lead-soaked, shoddily made Chinese toys + impoverished U.S. consumers = CAPITALISM CLEARLY WORKING.

If you’re wondering whether or not there’s a non-ironic/non-Schadenfreude reason to ever walk into one of these stores, there really isn’t. Yeah, you can laugh at the hastily whipped up book section, or the toy section littered with dozens upon dozens of lead-infused, knock-off action figures from China, but the palpable gloom and despair emanating from every human being within a good block of the business is just too much for anybody that isn’t an out and out nihilist. All in all, you’re likelier to walk out of a Pol Pot exhibit with a smile on your face than you are a Dollar Tree anywhere in the continental U.S.

The only (and I do mean ONLY) major positive I can think about visiting a Dollar Tree is that it sort of makes you feel like a higher evolutionary being whenever you get the hell out of there. Even in today’s downcast economy, you can waltz into a DT with a $20 bill and amble out with a good week’s worth of produce (and for me, produce means $16 worth of frozen cheese sticks and a composition book or two). Hell, you can even create a virtual smorgasbord of foodstuffs for about a fraction of the cost of eating something that was, you know, good. The rationalization process, I imagine, is that people that go into a Dollar Tree do so with this inflated sense of self-superiority - as in, “I don’t REALLY have to buy my stuff here, but I’m going to, just for the LULZ.”

Which, ironically, is exactly what you will do if you ever go into one of these stores...

I guess you’re wondering why I would even bother doing a blog post about something so utterly irrelevant. Well, that short answer is that there’s a pizza place with a rare Sega “Airline Pilots” cabinet in it, but since there was a 300 pound man with Down Syndrome and a family of five playing DDR (no, seriously), I couldn’t wedge myself through the human fiesta and get around to recording it. And since there’s a Dollar Tree right next door…well, I might as well take pictures of SOMETHING, right?

Every Dollar Tree in America is different, but at the same time, they’re all pretty much the same. The actual in-store products may vary, but on the whole, you’re getting the exact same kind of stuff no matter which store you walk into. I’ve never visited a Dollar Tree in Spokane, Washington, but I’m pretty sure, they too, have a dizzying array of turkey basters and travel sized deodorant on display. I guess the biggest variable is that some stores feature frozen goods, and some have expanded grocery sections. For a while, there was one in town that advertised “bread”…as in, with the full quotation marks and everything. I guess now is a good time to remind you that when you eat Dollar Tree produce, you pretty much are taking your life into your own hands.

Just look at all of that VALUE! And by "value," I really mean "crap I don't need."

Since I really, really needed change for a ten, I decided to take a walk around the local Dollar Tree, and pick up as much useless crap as necessary to ensure that I got at least four singles in the aftermath. In a store consisting of nothing but absolutely superfluous overstock, what did I burn an exact $5.27 on that evening? Well, since you asked, here’s what I picked up on my impromptu visit to the “Tree of Woe…”

A Book Written By That Guy That Started RegretTheError.Com!

The book section at Dollar Tree is always a total crap shoot; most of the time, the aisle is littered with stuff nobody in their right minds would ever want to read, but every now and then, you get lucky, and find yourself that book O.J. Simpson wrote about killing his wife, or one of the myriad discounted Ron Paul manifestos, or if fortune is really smiling upon you, perhaps even a book written by John Walsh, who looks really, really vengeful and constipated on the front cover. That said, nine times out of ten, you’ll probably find a grand total of nothing worth a damn on your visit - but since you’re only spending a measly one dollar, American, on something that was originally hawked at about 25 bucks, who cares if you end up taking home a brick in literary form?

On my trip, “Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech,” was far and away the most interesting sounding title I uncovered. Actually, it was the ONLY interesting sounding title I uncovered, and since I direly need something to read after I finish “The Hobbit,” I figured what the heck - I once spent $50 plus tax to play “Brute Force,” so throwing down a one dollar bill for a five year old book is relatively sane behavior in comparison.

The author of the book is a fellow named Craig Silverman, who founded the website RegertTheError.Com. Admittedly, I’ve never heard of the site before, but then again, I didn’t find out that the guy that played the principal in “Ferris Bueller” was a registered sex offender until a half hour ago, so consider me WELL out of the loop when it comes to contemporary culture.

By and large, Silverman’s book isn’t my typical reading fare, but I have this thing where I can’t go to sleep unless I read something of considerable substance and weight. And since the thing is about 350 plus pages, it’s most definitely of both considerable substance AND weight. And if it proves an entertaining read, I’ll get back to you on its contents…probably.

Extreme Fighting Action Figures from China!

By now, we all know that I am a huge mixed martial arts enthusiast. By now, you should also realize that I have a fondness for both low culture, consumer-grade crap and finding any reason at all to discredit the Chinese as an economic superpower, so consider this “Extreme Fighting” play set to constitute an early Christmas gift for me.

I really don’t know where to begin here. First off, it seems to me that the Chinese notion of “cage fighting” is culled entirely from “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” with the “adversaries” decked out in war paint and safety goggles. The figures themselves are lawsuit bait, with the guy in the glasses looking a LOT like former WCW grappler “Buff Bagwell,” while the other toy is, essentially, an African-American version of Kratos from the “God of War” games.

Apparently, the "Vale Tudo" days were a whole lot more hardcore then we imagined them...

There were actually quite a few variations of this set on sale, including one that featured a dude in a lucha-libre mask packaged with a more Caucasian-looking Kratos and a piece of guardrail. Obviously, this set became an absolute must-buy for me, since it features the most bizarre MMA-accessories in history. Granted, the early days of the UFC were pretty brutal, but I don’t seem to recall Tank Abbott ever breaking out a baseball with spikes in it, or Keith Hackney finishing off a foe with a goddamn chainsaw. Then again, I haven’t seen EVERY PRIDE FC show, so who knows? Maybe there’s a rare Frye/Takayama bout out there with the two pummeling each other with power tools or something.

Aim Toothpaste!

Because I have teeth, and periodically, I like to clean them. Umm…yeah, I guess there’s not too much to add to that, I suppose.

A Four Pack of Freedent Spearmint Chewing Gum!

Once again, not really an exciting product, and a purchase made more out of basic utility than guffaws, but I still got a laugh out of the fine print that PROMISES that the gum won’t stick to “most dentures.” Also, I noted that the expiration date on the package was about two weeks ago, so…uh-oh. 

A Bottle of Brisk Raspberry Tea (That Was Really, Really Warm!) 

You know, I don’t normally drink giant-assed bottles of tea, but then again, it’s not normally 117 freaking degrees in Atlanta, either.

I guess the peculiar thing is that the staffers at the DT didn’t feel the need to refrigerate the bottles…so these things were jutting out of the middle of the aisle, while some nice sunshine radiation heated the beverages to the point where the things were basically Pasteurized. Needless to say, my first swig of this stuff wasn’t a pleasant one…a notion that I will blame partially on the drink’s inherent warmness, and the other half because the beverage was CLEARLY past its expiration date.

...and what's the worst that can come out of beef stored at inadequate temperatures?

So, what did I ultimately learn on my recent expedition to the Dollar Tree? Well, absolutely nothing, outside of the fact that the place sucks, is an unfathomably depressing environment, and a great place to purchase products that are not only out of date, but possibly filled with volatile chemicals that could cause your children to explode.

Some people say that stores like the Dollar Tree are a boon to the economically disadvantaged, providing them with cheap products that they, otherwise, couldn’t afford. I tend to think it’s the opposite case, with a bunch of corporate masterminds taking advantage of the downtrodden and selling them damaged, shady and in some instances, life-threatening goods at a monumental profit…

…but, since they DO have pretty good deals on batteries and bubble gum sometimes, I guess I can overlook the whole “exploiting/kinda’ poisoning the poor” thing. Hell, eight AA’s for a dollar is worth an incinerated crib or two, I imagine…

Read More

An Afternoon At Big Lots

Where Mass-Market Consumerism Goes To Die...

Do you ever have those moments where you’re walking through a department store, and you see something so astonishingly out-of-date that you wonder how anybody in their right mind would consider purchasing it? Maybe it’s an Angry Birds chew toy, or maybe it’s a tee-shirt dedicated to Charlie Sheen’s crippling drug dependency issues - when you see it, you just know it’s going to be off the shelving in a matter of months, unlikely to ever be viewed by human eyes ever again.

Ultimately, this leads to another puzzle of sorts: where exactly does that instantly dated crap go once it’s ushered off the aisles of America’s big box retailers? Does it get trucked out into the desert and buried in mass merchandising graves, or do they get air-mailed to Zimbabwe as part of some tax-write off or something?

Well, if you’ve wondered about the whereabouts of the discarded crap middle America no longer wants, wonder no more: when mass marketing goods die, they don’t go to heaven or hell, they go here:



What, you’ve never heard of Big Lots before? Clearly, you’ve never been poor in America, then. Big Lots, essentially, is that missing link between Wal-Mart and the Dollar Store, the retailer version of Sasquatch, if you will. The store is an operation that specializes in hawking surplus or overstocked products. . .as well as just mildly damaged and irregular products, too. In other words? It’s the veritable purgatory for mass marketed, American consumer goods.

There are things you’ll find in a Big Lots store that you probably won’t see ever again, unless they somehow resurface on eBay ten years later. The place is basically a repository for stuff that you couldn’t give away for free, the sort of junk that has cluttered the very bottom of America’s bargain bins for years and years. Amidst copies of unsold L. Ron Hubbard and Ron Paul tomes, you’ll find all sorts of recently anachronistic goods, from about a million jillion holiday food sets (if you need Bubble Yum candy canes, they’ve got enough to last you until the UEFA Finals) to stuff that would almost be neat if it wasn’t for the fact that the versions on sale are heavily damaged and stained (alike an animatronics “Abominable Snowman” from the Rankin/Bass “Rudolf” special that, despite having a moving mouth, lacks the capacity to make any sort of sound.)



I recently took a trip to a nearby outlet, and decided to peruse through the (mostly bent and rusted) shelves of the neighborhood Big Lots, in an attempt to spot the most ridiculous - and in some instances, socially damning - items on sale. Needless to say, there is some exceptional, exceptional crap on tap if you’re interested.



First up, how about an entire assortment of foodstuffs endorsed by a stand-up comedian that has a routine where he mocks starving African children for having flies circling around their swollen eyeballs? Oh, and he’s also the voice of a talking tow truck in a popular series of family films, as well - how could I forget.

This is precisely the kind of stuff that makes Big Lots not only a graveyard of sorts for mass market-capitalism, but in some ways, a cemetery for soon-to-be forgotten pop-cultural items. I, for one, had no idea that this stuff existed, let alone why anybody would want it to. Somewhere, at some point in time, some marketing guy said that the white trash, probably racist comedy-fan demographic was large enough to make an instant-fish batter assortment viable as a product - which, admittedly, gets me way too excited for the prospect of some hilariously stereotypical goods hawked by Carlos Mencia a good five or six years down the line.



And speaking of things that really screw with the whole space-time continuum, here’s an entire display dedicated to a line of “retro” 7-Up sodas. Needless to say, these packages - many of them partially shredded and dusted in a brown crud I can only presume to be feces of some undeterminable origin - have seen better days before getting hoisted on the shelving here. The thing that really struck me about this was that, despite being a huge soda aficionado, I don’t think I recall ever seeing these on the store shelves of any legit retailers in my part of the country. The reality before us? Not only are these most likely expired beverages, they’ve probably been trucked and maintained in room-temperature storage for several months before being placed in the middle of the aisle - non-refrigerated, of course - at this particular store.



They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and when that picture entails Power Rangers-themed macaroni, you’re looking at a Tolstoy in the making. There’s not really a whole lot you can say about this one, I guess. . .although if it gives you indigestion, you could always get super-cute and yell “TYRANOSAURUS!” will struggling through a particularly tough dump, I suppose.



Although there is a TON of weird-ass items in the food section of the store, the toy aisle is perhaps even more messed up. For starters, what kid out there WOULDN’T want an action figure modeled after a dude world renowned for getting liquored up and making racially insensitive remarks about deceased pro wrestlers from the ‘80s? The fact that this thing doesn’t have a talking voice chip is one of the biggest missed opportunities I’ve ever seen for anything…



To prove that 2010 happened to future generations, I reckon, there’s a board game modeled after “The Jersey Shore” on sale, too. Admittedly, I’m not really sure why this and the Seinfeld version of “Scene It?” are in the kids section, but whatever. The sooner they learn about nihilism and crude Italian stereotypes, they better they are for it, I surmise.

Hey, what do you get the person that has everything? Well, how about some Black Eyed Peas mugs? With that in mind, what do you get someone you really, really don’t like? The exact same thing. Hell, with 64 fluid ounces of alcohol in me is pretty much the only way you could convince me to listen to their “music” anyway.

And that, I assure you, is just the tip of the moribund iceberg. There’s an electronics section in there too, but since there’s really not that much exciting about Dharma and Greg DVDs, I decided to skip it and run my way through the food section one more time. Hey, those Jolly Ranchers-flavored sodas aren’t going to be on sale forever, you know.

Needless to say, my waltz through the local Big Lots was about as depressing as a jog down the cancer ward. From a sociological perspective, it’s kind of interesting to peer at all the stuff that’s obsolete for “mainstream” consumers - which, conversely, is the stuff the poor and the downtrodden in this country have no option but to purchase. A couple of things surprised me about my visit, most notably, the surprisingly large section dedicated to Hispanic foods. It seems like every single aisle was capped by a display for hot sauce or traditional Mexican candies, which makes me ponder a many things about who the real target audience is for overstock stores of the like.

There’s really no way to sugarcoat it; browsing through these aisles is like ambling down poverty row and experiencing the miseries of just about every underserved minority in the nation. Poor whites, blacks and Latinos shuffle in and out of these buildings all day long, jamming their buggies with beat up cans of salt-speckled vegetables and melted candies to take home to their no doubt malnourished children. And if they’re lucky, they might just get that Guitar Hero action figure lodged between the lukewarm Jones Soda and Cocoa Peebles cereal bars. Well, probably not, but their parents kind of mulled over it, anyway.

Most of the time, when I tell you people about my adventures, I do so because I want to give you a template so that you can try out your own psychosocial experiment. In this instance, however, I’m not really sure I would advocate stopping by a Big Lots for any real reason - unless, of course, you’re one of those sorts that really gets a kick out of watching people shamble about with no discernable reason to live anymore.

Granted, we all have our curiosities about the end of mass-marketed consumer goods’ life cycles, and while you do see exactly that at Big Lots, you’ll also end up seeing a whole lot more stuff you probably don’t want to - like the huddled, hungry masses, being particularly hungry and huddled. If nothing else, Big Lots is your welcome mat to the very tail-end of the American consumption cycle - and wouldn’t you know it, it’s a tail end that stinks to high heaven.

Read More