Haven’t bought name brand Pop-Tarts in years, but have occasionally picked up Toaster 'Betes or whatever the off-brand versions are called.
Noticed a ‘sale’ on the name brand and got conned into buying them. They’re now smaller, have less frosting, and have way less filling. The damn things were so flimsy that two of them snapped trying to take them out of the toaster.
If you get a craving for some nice sugary betes for breakfast, stick to the off-brands. They’re now higher quality than the name brand.
The future is stupid.
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So it’s basically a cracker now?
It’s like a cracker sandwich with the same amount of filling you’d get by lightly buttering toast.
I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or if the recipe has changed but I feel Pop Tarts are worse than when I was a kid (late 80s / early 90s).
Late 40s here so same, it’s definitely not nostalgia. I was a chonkey bastard so I’d get the s’mores ones once they came out and eat the crust ring on the outside then pull them open to gorge on the sweet s’mores innards.
There’s so little filling now that both halves seem bare, and the things are so thin and brittle they crack into a dozen pieces in the attempt.
Lol, I’m glad someone else would eat the crust ring first.
I would break off the crust pieces and eat those, and then break the poptart in half long-ways so I had two long strips, enabling me to take very large full-mouth bites of just the sweet frosted and filled part
Pop tarts are infinitely shittier than they were even 5 years ago, it’s not just you. I bought one pack last year and never will again. They are trash crackers that feel like some bean counter went “yep still frosted on top, filling in the middle, good to go”. Now they are trying to sell “super stuffed” variants too that still don’t meet the old standards. Fuck poptarts.
Trash.
Ever since Pop Tarts started going down the shitter I’ve been saying they’d make a fortune if they did their own version of the Double Stuf Oreo aka just sell Pop Tarts with an actual amount of filling with measurable thickness rather than a thin sheen. Now by the time they’ve gotten around to it, they’re still a bastardized shrinkflation shadow of their former selves, and the flavors they chose for them look utterly unappealing on the box to boot.
Same way with hot pockets, you can’t drip any hot sauce or grease on your face because there’s almost nothing in them. These days I make my snacks.
LOL, WTF is that photo.
The decline of an empire, visualized.
My eyes
Boring ass dystopia. They also made a “new” one that’s has extra filling etc. It’s basically the original but now they charge out the ass and give you half as many
I buy store brand everything now. It’s ridiculous. Have you had a brand name Fig Newton lately? It’s sawdust. Ridiculous.
Speaking of fig newtons. We started getting dried rosselino or Salem white figs in bulk and just having those instead. So much better than any fig newtons thing.
If you can get them, the Clover Valley ones ($1.85 @ Dollar General) are pretty good, although the fig filling is golden rather than brown.
Thank you. Will give em a try!
I have not but I might have made that mistake in the future. Thanks for the warning. It’s so weird that off-brands for everything appeared as cheaper lower quality versions and then the world went to such shit they’re now the higher quality version.
How are so many things now worse quality and higher priced than their own knock-offs? They should all be committing Sudoku in shame.
I am convinced the terms “generic” and “off brand” are both psyops to get people more into big brands.
I mean, back in the day they were true. You could get the name brand stuff, or the off brand stuff that looked mostly the same but had a weird after taste or something. Now the name brand stuff has degraded completely but the off brands have barely changed. Hopefully it stays this way, because we’re like 2 steps of enshittification away from everything tasting like sawdust.
committing Sudoku in shame
The Pillsbury Doughboy has a bit of a belly, it might be difficult to disembowel himself with a math puzzle.
I appreciate the typo, it’s funnier.
It’s not a typo, just a meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/commit-sudoku
Paper cuts are no joke when you’re only 2 inches tall.
Seppuku*
Gesundheit
appeared as cheaper lower quality versions
They really never were. This was a reputation, yes, but it was not warranted. It’s taken a hell of a long time for enough people to realize this.
Nothing significant has changed in the last couple of decades, at least. Maybe back into the 60s, 70s, 80s or so, I won’t debate. But since the turn fo the century at a minimum, store brands almost always use a producer that produces for name brands. It’s often literally the same product. At worst, it might be stuff that didn’t quite make the name brand standards, or it might hvae a little less quality or something, but almost all of the time, it’s the same thing.
There might be some exception - I certainly haven’t tried the myriad of store brands for stores I haven’t gone to, but i’ve been buying mostly store brands for quite a number of years now, and almost all the time, there’s no difference.
Like one I can think of: Store-brand “Doritos” might have a bit less “cheese” on them. Or might have the same, depends. Most of the time it’s the same thing, though.
Yeah… I’m talking about all those years you’re skipping. Off-brands didn’t used to be made on the same production lines. And since the off-brand pop tarts are much different and better, it seems they’re still not.
How are so many things now worse quality and higher priced than their own knock-offs?
They earned public trust and brand-recognition over many years. Then, once they became the de facto product, they started min-maxing their production. Smaller portions, cheaper ingredients, automating as much of the production line as possible to cut employees, reducing wages for “less work”, etc. They’re hoping no one would notice that the product you’re buying isn’t living up to the original standard.
If you’re willing to pay the same price for cheaper production, then the company can literally make money without having to sell more product. They can show in their shareholder meetings that sales are going way up, even though consumer purchases may not have changed much at all. Heck, even if sales are going down, profits could still show an increase!
Then of course, there’s “inflation,” which they use to justify raising prices over time. Even though the product is worse than the original, you’re now paying way more for it.
This is the endgame of capitalism. Maximize profits at the cost of consumers. When money is the primary focus of a business, quality of goods and services will always degrade over time.
You can read about The Thermocline of Trust, which I found interesting.
psssst… Nature’s Bakery are dope.
trying to take them out of the toaster.
You… you actually toast them?
I never have consumed them on a regular basis, but I don’t think I’ve ever toasted them a single time. lol
I don’t like my food raw. You should see how black my m… ok, that started to sound like a sex joke. But really I burn the shit out of meat.
Yup. Whatever the generic store brand is 1000% better. I tried both recently too and Pop Tarts were disappointing.
They do have more flavor options but that’s really it.
If anyone’s interested, Bon Appétit had a “Gourmet Makes” or something where one of their chefs would recreate snacks like Oreos, Pop Tarts, and others. They look great. I tried a version of the oreos, mine were nowhere near as pretty, but the taste is so much better.
They were based on real tarts originally. They’ve gotten so crappy you might as well go back to baking them yourself.
I think baking tarts is a sex crime.
I once bought them in a “american sectuon” in a supermarket, because i kept seeing them on tv. I couldn’t believe that people would actually eat sweet cardboard and like it.
I don’t know about knock off brands but there were such better options for toaster pastries since the 90’s. So much so one of my kids tried a pop tart at some point and thought there disgusting. Overly sweet on a cardboard cracker.
I think they have always been bad. All the brand bame stuff is usually bad. You just gotta look for the good stuff.
Product death by a thousand cuts. Cut here, cut there…
Okay, I have to put my foot down. Pop-Tarts originally didn’t have frosting and they were much better. I don’t want to hear any more about this frosting shit.
The frosting started in 1967. It’s sort of been a while on that one.
I started eating them when they first came out in my area in '65.
Some varieties/flavors never had frosting. Thus the confusion.
I don’t remember any that didn’t, only a few flavors that normally came frosted but also had a marked unfrosted version.
Is this a Mandela effect thing from the universe you came from? Did the Monopoly man have his monocle there?
I dunno. Maybe. I didn’t eat a ton of pop tarts, honestly. But I’m fairly sure there were unfrosted flavors back in the day.
But I still have a monopoly set with a battleship as one of the playing pieces.
Wait, they try to say that wasn’t one of them now? Because of course it was.
On we know.
They are garbage.
They are also ultra processed. They probably don’t really even have to wrap them in that fake foil wrap because they are gonna stay exactly the same without it.
Dude those things are more sugary than a handful of candy along with minimal nutritional value. They were good like 15+ years ago but the enshittification has fully run its course. I stopped buying them years ago…
Every can of pringles I buy now is undercooked and the last can I bought they forgot to add salt to any of the chips. (No it wasn’t labeled as “reduced salt” or anything like that, I checked)
Ya. I really noticed the recent decline in pringles. As cheap and crappy as they were before, they are noticeably way worse now.
The “hot ones” are good, though. I still prefer the Pringles style Lays buffalo wing flavor, but those are damn hard to find.
The equity firms will enshittify everything
If it has “equity” or “capital” in its name you are fucked.
