Not As Many People Want To Eat Jell-O Anymore, I Guess

Sit down. Maybe you should sit down for this. Please sit down. Are you sitting? Hey, no, that's Grandpa's chair. Somewhere else. Sit. Roll over. (Ha, little joke there.) No, just, would you please take a seat. Thank you. And brace yourself.

Jell-O's sales fell by 19 percent between 2009 and 2013. (!!!!!!!!!!)

Yes, it's true. The venerable wigglesnack earned a mere, a pathetic, a shameful, an its-parents-have-to-lie-to-the-neighbors-about-how-much-money-it-makes $753.8 million last year, off from the $932.5 million it hauled in five years ago, back in the hopeful times, back when the verdant world bloomed with possibility and all a man needed was the clothes on his back, the industry in his two hands, and some kind of jiggly post-meal refreshment he could cut into cheeky wiener shapes.

As with most of the other disasters of our modern, fallen era, the source of the problem is Greek yogurt, which continues its unchecked incursion into the market for foods that people can pretend are not really food, but are really more like a beverage (or, hell, maybe even a vitamin? I mean some vitamins are sweet, right?) when they're feeling deprived, sensorily, during the generation of tedious weekly reports in their sad cubicles, on the strength of its "nutritional value" and "Greekness" and "not being weird translucent juice-rubber."

Oh, but these are rough times for Jell-O: buying half-tanks of gas with the change in its cupholder; gradually bumping up the ratio of rice to real food in the meals it serves at home and hoping the kids won't notice; bartering its embedded fruit cocktail in exchange for another week of electricity. How can a jiggly dessert company survive on a mere 753.8 million dollars in sales? How can it live? What kind of life is this. No kind of life. No kind of life at all.

Someday, society will have no more room for Jell-O.

[ bigstory.ap.org]

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