Some states in the US are bending the rules for now…
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Pretty sure Tang is still around.
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Yeah we’re all aware.
But even where bars and restaurants are officially open attendance is still significantly lower. And sales are still minimal.
Take out drinks are a solution to an 80% fall in restaurant attendance. It’s like allowing take out only, it’s a short term way to string things along. Most just to keep a handful of people working for a bit longer. Take out is unsustainable for most restaurants. And the vast majority can’t afford a 10% loss for more than a month or two.
This isn’t really gonna go away with covid either. Alcohol sales were already slumping almost across the board. And this past fall and winter were the worst for the service industry nation wide even before you tossed a pandemic at it.
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But it’s not very prominent any more. It used to be bigger than Gatorade. Ayds might still be around if they’d used another name, but I think it would have faded into obscurity in the same way.
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ISTR that in the 1980s Microsoft tried marketing an “Artificial Intelligence Development System” but that didn’t go anywhere on account of the obvious abbreviation (apart from the fact that, being a 1980s Microsoft product, it would probably have sucked, anyway). I can’t find anything on the Internet about it now, though, so maybe it is just a funny story after all.
I guess Ayds is a US-only thing? Never heard of it in UK and I have no idea what an “anti-suppressant candy” is.
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I always liked it and back in March I was worried and bought a case at Costco as a gesture of support. Good to know they are doing ok!
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“Cool story, bro” time: I work in a grocery store that sells a ridiculous amount of boozahol, and we’re still selling a metric fuckton of Corona.
Not sure if people are buying it ironically or not though.
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Diet candy is the “handie” of confections. Always a bit sad and pathetic. Certainly not what anyone really wants at the moment.
I had a glass of Tang this morning. I’ve always liked it and it doesn’t sour my stomach like orange juice.
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I have been intentionally ordering Corona beer when its on the menu lately, specifically because I had read about the impending collapse of the company and somehow felt it was uniquely unfair to them.
You would rightly ask, “Why did I feel the need to protect a corporate brand from public shunning?”
That is a question I will ask myself every day until my grave.
I have no logical explanation for my behavior. “irony” I guess 
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I actually like Corona (come at me, beer snob bros!) and I would have bought more of it than the none I did this summer, but I was already stressed out by shopping and I wasn’t up for the possibility that someone would make some jokey remark and FUCK YOU MAN I’M NOT LOOKING FOR SMALL TALK RIGHT NOW.
Sorry, Constellation Brands®. I’ll mail you a check for the difference.
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Since my beer tastes run to IPAs, I find it very hard to distinguish Corona from any of the other watery lagers on the market, including American ones like Coors and imported ones like Stella Artois. There are huge marketing dollars behind the major beer brands, to keep the brand name in the front of people’s minds and to project a positive image of it. Whether they prosper or not probably depends more on the success of those marketing campaigns than anything intrinsic to the beer, like say, taste.
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There’s always Microsoft BOB ^^’ .
Yes, that’s right, an entire GUI built around Clippy o.o’ .
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As VeronicaConnor mentioned above:
(Maybe Carla was conflating the ideas of “anti-appetite” and “appetite-suppressant” ?)
Way back when, I was a kid, my dad bought a box of Ayds candies for my mom. Yeah, she wasn’t pleased. I had a huge sweet tooth, and I think I (sneakily) ate up almost all of them. (I’m sure that was actually fine with my mom.) It was like a chewy caramel, fortified with some vitamins. I think you were supposed to have one or two with a cup of tea shortly before your meal. Naturally, a bit of sugar plus some volume of water would likely help you eat less, at least at the meal. No telling what you might eat later when you got hungry again from not having had enough to eat at your meal, though.
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It was just a perfect storm.
Especially in the '80s, the phonetic impact of “AIDS” hits you like a ton of bricks. It’s shocking. Almost like an expletive.
Then, Ayds was in the “medicine”/“health” category, leading to a conceptual blurring between AIDS/Ayds. There’s no such blurring between a virus and a beer.
Plus, the virus goes by “coronavirus”, “Covid-19”, “SARS CoV-2”. It isn’t the absolutely identical homonym that AIDS/Ayds is. In some of the marketing/packaging, it’s also similarly capitalized: ie, AYDS, not Ayds. Early marketing campaigns even spelled out the name (“A… y… d… s…”), leading to yet more conflation that AYDS, too, was an acronym, like AIDS.
On the other hand, Corona marketing hypes less the product than the lifestyle itself (eg, being a couple, on a beach, watching a sunset, oh, and drinking a beer). Whereas, Ayds ads relentlessly tout their unfortunately named brand: “The Ayds plan […] Ayds contains one of the most effective appetite suppressants you can buy! […] Ayds helped me get back into a size 6! […] Why not try Ayds?” With every sentence there is a horrible, sickening juxtaposition.
(Off-topic: What is Ayds going on about with their “No Drugs” claim? It had Benzocaine, and, later, phenylpropanolamine. Perhaps people just caught on to the fact that this was a deleterious product.)
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I have to say, I don’t mind Corona Beer. It has a nice generic lagerish taste. What I do mind is the price. It’s twice what a locally brewed lager costs.
I do highly recommend adding a slice of lime and a few shots of Franks hot sauce to your Corona. It vastly improves the flavor.
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It actually contained an appetite suppressing drug.
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Yep. Those “diet candies” and “appetite suppressants” back then were mostly stimulants. Some had forms of amphetamine in them, others were just caffeine, but they were all pretty not a good idea.
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Wow, that’s interesting! I had no idea. I always thought it was just vitamin-fortified candy. I never noticed any strange effects from eating it, at least that I can recall from way back then. In the Wikipedia article, the timeline of Ayds is a bit hazy—it looks like they were introduced in the 1930s or 40s? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, while early versions contained the drugs, maybe it didn’t have the drugs in it by the late 60s and 70s (kind of like Coca-Cola)…I’m just surmising, though…
I don’t know exactly when the type of stricter ingredient labeling that we have now in the U.S. came to be. But here, from someone’s flicker, is the box I remember:
The ingredients listed on the box in that photo are:
Corn syrup, sweetened condensed whole milk, oleo & vegetable oil, tricalcium phosphate, soya flour, emulsifier, powdered carrots, non-fat dry milk solids, powdered egg yolk, salt, imitation and natural vanilla flavor, iron phosphate (insoluble), lecithin. Each 4 pieces is fortified with [a wordy description of vitamins D, A, B1, B2, calcium, phosphorus, iron] APPROXIMATE ANALYSIS (w/w): Protein 4%; Fat 9.9%; Carbohydrates 72.5%; available calories per piece, 26.
(The analysis of protein, fat, and carbohydrates by weight adds up to 86.4%. I assume the rest of the weight was moisture, since it was a soft, chewy caramel candy.)
I don’t see benzocaine or phenylpropanolamine listed… But any labeling laws covering it may have depended on whether it was sold as a food/candy or as an over-the-counter medicine, so they may not have had to disclose all ingredients…
Interesting, thanks for pointing that out to me!
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