Gone—but not Forgotten!

I don't consider myself to be one of those people who buys brand name items for the sake of the brand name. When I find a product I really like, however, I do expect the store in which I found the product to carry it permanently. I have an internal system which stamps my own brand of approval on certain products, very similar to the well-known "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." And I am very loyal to those products until the day when, inevitably, it disappears from the shelf! Just what is up with that?

Unfortunately, it seems my entire life has been plagued with great products disappearing. When I was a mere young child, Mom would get this cereal for us called "Fortified Oat Flakes." And those were the best flakes in the world. They were a little pricier than bran flakes, and they didn't give us the silverware that eating 200 boxes of bran flakes did (Mom got about twenty place settings of that bran flake silverware, and so you can imagine we got bran-flaked out!). So when we did get to eat Fortified Oat Flakes—My! What a treat! And then they stopped making it for a very long period of time. Probably five or six years later, Post (?) brought those oat flakes back for a period of time, and we loved them just as much. And then they disappeared again and haven't been seen since! How tragic! Other things from my childhood that have disappeared include Bonkers (candy) and good Vitamin C's (the ones you get now just aren't the same).

This is just one example of high-quality products disappearing from local inventories. There was my favorite scent of deodorant, for example—now gone. After months of Sharon's favorite deodorant being gone, she finally found it—in a salvage grocery store! Martha White lemon poppy seed muffins---yummy! Bowling Green has it, but it's not to be found in Franklin! And it's the same story with Blueberry Morning. My favorite razor (Gillette Agility)—gone! They've recently either stopped making, or at least stopped carrying, the narrow, full-sized Goody's hair combs (are you kidding me?). Then there was Great Value (Wal-Mart brand) sparkling lemonade ($.50 per liter) that was so delicious and is now gone—probably to make room for the nasty GV crackers. The Great Value cheese pizza was one of the best frozen pizzas in the freezer aisle. It too is gone. For a while baking parchment paper (a wonderful product) was missing. (It has recently made a reappearance, and I have stocked up!)

Remember pentels?! The ones with the twist-eraser but WITHOUT the grip—gone. The supposed "upgrade" is a sad, sad mistake. And then there are the shoes… I was much too poor to afford a pair of Eastlands when they were very much the rage, and by the time I became of monetary means sufficient to make a $60 purchase---gone. Oh, sure there are the kind that have 3 in. soles, but they just aren't the same. (Lucky for me, the Franklins came back as a limited edition, and so I do now own a pair—a pair for which I must wear band-aids so my heels aren't torn up.)

And the newly-revamped fabric department at my local Wal-Mart—what a JOKE! If you can find a zipper and thread in there, count yourself lucky.

And herein lies the tragedy of my tale. I currently have a very, very sore throat—the kind that requires a full head movement every time I swallow. The kind where you have white pus pockets on your tonsils. The kind where the doc takes a look and says, "oh my!" The kind where Mom makes chicken soup and Dad says she must donate the whole pot to the cause of getting better. The kind where I am inclined to gag every once in a while as my throat closes up due to no lozenge in my mouth. The kind that wakes you up in the middle of the night. And THERE IS NO CEPASTAT on the shelves of any drug store anywhere!! Oh, there is Cepacol alright---BUT IT'S NOT THE SAME. There are Chloraseptic lozenges—which I bought today and could not even finish the first one (Free Cycle it is). My Halls Breezers (a fairly new product) are there to provide some taste relief at least, but my favorite flavor of last year—Tropical Chill—GONE!

So let me extol the virtues of Cepastat. Cepastat is only the number one sore throat lozenge, as far as I am concerned. It deadens the throat, and the taste is not bad at all. And the stores are selling Chloraseptic Disgust in its place??? Thank goodness for the Internet. I have found that Cepastat is, in fact, still being made. It's probably being sold in stores somewhere too. But not anywhere around here!! And so I have ordered three boxes of Cepastat from PlanetRX.com. I was too cheap, however, to expedite the shipping, and so it should make it just in time for next year's sore throat.

In the meantime, I am offering my services as a retail product consultant even as I wonder which one of my current favorites will be the next to join the ranks of the "Gone but not forgotten" club.

What products do you miss?