Can able

A few years back my favorite convenience store chain, QuikTrip, removed 12-ounce cans of soda from their coolers.

Oh sure, they still stocked the big 12 packs of 12-ounce cans, but you couldn't buy a single, cold 12-ounce Mountain Dew from the refrigerator case anymore. Coupled with that, they also removed the 12-ounce cups from their soda fountain.
So, if you wanted to buy a nice refreshing soda beverage, basically had to commit to drinking 22 ounces of carbonated sugar water to quench your thirst and spike your triglyceride levels.

Round about this same time, I noticed that the break rooms where I work removed virtually all of the 12-ounce soda options from the vending machines. You basically were limited to Coke or Diet Coke if you wanted a 12-ouncer.

So yeah, it sucked. I basically chalked it up to another conspiracy hatched by the soda-industrial complex designed to force us to buy more MellowYellow than we actually want. It's just another step in making Americans fatter and lazier and easier to manipulate when leading them to the slaughter.

Now fast-forward to a year or so ago when I started to see small cans of soda appear on supermarket shelves. Finally, I thought, some of my domestic sleeper operatives in key government regulatory agencies are getting something useful done (aside from the "substance abuse and promiscuity" of some of my agents. I tell ya, good help is hard to find these days).

Now I don't want to take all the credit for soft drink makers putting these more reasonably sized portions back on the shelves. I think it's important to give credit where it's due, and I'd like to encourage the bottlers to sell these smaller 7.5 ounce cans in more locations, including the vending machines in my office.

There are several good reasons why they should.
For one thing, most of us don't want to drink 20 ounces of soda at a time. If you're like me (and god help you if you are, you poor bastard), you typically leave about a third of the soda in a typical 20-ounce bottle unconsumed, only to throw it away when you get to the office the next morning.

This is just wasteful. Forget about the number of plastic bottles that are littering the landfills and creating a floating island of plastic out in the Pacific Ocean, do you know what all that acidic, carbonated sugar water can do to your office trash can when it spills in there? It's a gawdawful mess is what it is!



And then there's the whole nutritional side of things. Not only do we not want a whopping 20 ounces of soda, we shouldn't drink that much anyway. It's just not good for you.

Granted, we all have to drink soda because of the addictive additives used by the secret cabal of high-fructose corn syrup producers (of which Ted Turner is the reigning imperator, btw) to control the population. But it's a well known scientific FACT that we don't need more than about six ounces to maintain our minimum levels of mind-control substances. Anything beyond that and you're just adding weight around your middle. And nobody needs that. Am I right, people?

But there is one reason, above all others, why we need to keep these "mini" cans on store shelves. There is one benefit above all, one advantage beyond the health and environmental advantages, of buying these 7.5-ounce cans.

I love the way they make me feel like a giant when I'm holding one.

They're just so darned cute!


tagged: Coke, can, soda, size, food, waste, environmentalist