The dwindling pervasiveness of the Hickory Farms meat and cheese gift pak* is alarming. You used to be able to find this shit everywhere here in the Midwest.
Just look at that aesthetic artistry. Perfectly laid out to give you the blueprint of what a spreadsheet of preservatives could look like. Packed in, but not too chaotically…just right, with a handful of strawberry hard candies to reset the palate after the rear corner of your mouth got ice-picked from how goddamn sharp that Sharpy cheese wheel really was.
One of the best holiday gifts you could possibly give, or receive. If you’re me. Which I is.
I’m immediately impressed that the font on the crackers box is the same from Slayer’s Seasons In The Abyss era. Slayer must be fans from way back too, since Seasons came out in 1990. Not sure what other explanation there could be, Slayer’s like the rest of us in that they put their pants on one leg at a time, and they also like to make shopping fun instead of a chore.
After absorbing all that, now look at this flaccid member of a food gift pak. They actually used to actually fill the jesus-christin’ thing, for starters. This is…packflation or some shit. You could easily fit a couple more wheels and a fuckin’ spicy mustid (sic) in there, but noooOOOOoooo. Not even a shitty hard candy or four. (I say “shitty” with love there.) Profit over profound preservatives, pardon me for thinking this was America for a second.
Another thing, notice that the beef appears to be roughly the same size in the old and the new food gift paks. That’s cool. What I love is what qualified for a “beef stick” in the old days, though. A literal chub. Let’s fucking go. Nowadays, something could be the size and approximate density of a Virginia Slims 120 cigarette and be called a beef stick. Alright, alright, I’m exaggerating. A More 120s cigarette, then.
*Also remember when everything was a “pak” back in the day? The ‘c’ was pert-near always omitted. Why? It’s oddly specific enough to feel like there was something to it.
The baseball card companies even had some Pak-ish symmetry to them, with both Topps and Fleer referring to their packaging as either Rak-Pak’s or Rack Paks. Fleer had some C tolerance with Rack, but the Paks were non-negotiable and uniform.
As we see with Pepsi however, it must’ve become acceptable in the 90’s to reinstate the ‘c’ and call it a “pack” again. But they still couldn’t help themselves with a new misspelling, with “MAJIK.” Either the zeitgeist of Don Majkowski was inescapable (cannot be ruled out – he was a big deal up here for eight or nine minutes), or Pepsi’s marketing folks just fucking insisted on spelling shit wrong to increase sales, no matter the slogan, no matter the era.
Guys, we got marching orders to nuke a C. I don’t care where it is, or whose fucking C it is, but one’s gotta go, do you hear me? Make a C disappear. Now. IT’S THE CHOICE OF A NEW GENERATION, GOD DAMMIT!!
The Marketing Bosses at Pepsi, probably
And since you can’t exactly nuke the C in Choice of a New Generation, in comes Majik.
I have no idea where I’m going with this or how I got here, so this is a very hard ending. Sorry…kinda. I went on a tangent again.
I do know that I can’t get a good and honest goddamned meat and cheese pak around here anymore, though. Fuck’s sake.
XOXO
LV
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