I saw this gum in the checkout line today:
This is a pack of two different flavors of Mentos gum. The tagline is “2 flavors, 1 pack, you decide.”
I felt a little sad about humanity after seeing this. Apparently we feel so adrift on the drunken tides of fate, we’ll clutch at any tiny illusion of free will that is offered to us.
The thing is, if you really wanted two flavors of gum available to you at once, you’d just buy two flavors of gum. What Mentos is selling is the dream that we can control our lives, and I assume from its prominent placement in the candy rack that this is something people are finding useful.
I don’t know whether this is significant, but I saw this in Walmart.