Kender Surprise

Louise and I were in London Drugs today waiting in line behind someone that seemed to be having trouble remembering her pin number. It seems that the harder you try to remember the number the further it drifts away. I do what every one else in the world does while waiting to pay, I look at the crap the store has put at eye level for impulse purchases.

 

I am not much interested in how the twenty something starlets have managed to lose three pounds and I don’t care how bad that actors mug shot looks when he was arrested for drunk driving. I am beyond caring about the love triangle between Archie, Veronica and Betty. Archie should have married Betty years ago. I don’t smoke, so the lighters have no hold over me and although a tiny flashlight that is also a digital camera and a pen is terribly cute, I have no use for one. What I do like to look at though are the breath mints, cough drops and candy bars. I don’t buy any as a rule because the prices are inflated, but it doesn’t hurt to look.

 

Today, my eyes were drawn to the Kinder Surprises. I had heard that there were gender specific Kinder Surprises, but I just thought it was an April Fools joke. I can’t imagine anyone caring if the tiny snap together elephant was pink or blue and if our house is any indication, the toys get tossed almost as quickly as the tinfoil wrapping. I was a kid once and we had something similar, it was baseball and hockey cards that were packaged with gum. No one cared that much for the cards back then, it was the gum we were interested in. Yes, the gum was stale and pretty bad tasting, but it was gum. We also collected and traded the cards, but almost no one had a complete set and “doubles” were usually clothes pinned to the front fork of your bike to make a motorcycle sound.

 

In the forty years that have passed, it turns out that the cards were the things worth keeping, and keeping in mint condition if at all possible. I imagine that those crappy little toys will have a value that will increase as the years go on. More so it they are in the plastic container and the value will go up if the chocolate and the foil are undisturbed. I hope to live long enough to wish that I hadn’t eaten the chocolate or tossed the toys in the garbage.

By the time the woman in front of us had remembered her pin number, I had gone on to think about what other niche markets the Kinder Company might be able to cash in on. The first one that I thought of is Senior Surprise. They could put in little things that would appeal to us old farts. Things like coupons for free coffee or a quarter. Who doesn’t like free money? They could put in cheap plastic replicas of rotary phones, transistor radios, pictures of naked women, 8 track players, wrinkle cream, Viagra pills, tricycles, tiny posters of the Beatles and Stones, Peace signs and perhaps tiny little joints.

You know, if we are going to include drugs and porn, I’m betting the Kinder Company won’t have anything to do with it. I’ll need to do it myself and Louise suggested we call them Kender Surprises. They will be sold at hardware stores, any restaurant that offer senior discounts, coffee shops, discount stores and pro shops at the golf courses. This could be really big…