Where do products go when they die?

June 13, 2002 11:07 PM

Where do products go when they die? The thrill of walking down the aisle at the odds-and-ends store to find the weirdest items. The best one? Edible Worms.
posted by drezdn (13 comments total)

I don't get the insulting references to 1994 as the year in which everyone else's sense of humor stopped developing, Skallas. What new trends in comedy are us dated Gen-X codgers missing out on, exactly? I look around me and see nothing but sly, self-deprecating, Lettermanesque ironic wackiness from all generations. Have the Gen-Y and Gen-Z kiddies been secretly reviving slapstick and vaudeville or something?

Incidentally, you can buy Larvets edible worms at several online food stores. I don't think I'd want to get them at a dollar store. They wouldn't be fresh.
posted by rcade at 11:36 PM on June 13, 2002

Aren't we up to GEN-e now...?

Was there ever really a GEN-Z?
posted by krisjohn at 12:58 AM on June 14, 2002

Gen X, the very term seems so lame now, so last century. I'm glad I got a good job when I did and can now afford to shop for Esquivel albums on E Bay.
posted by johnny novak at 2:14 AM on June 14, 2002

which was one of the first movies to bring the slacker stereotype into the mainstream

Is that because the media told you so? I remember that's what "they" tried to tell me :P

This link was a damn awesome adventure of surreal materialistic discovery, and i enjoyed the ride. Don't see how gen-x could be linked to it other than it involving childlike glee, though. Nice find, drezdn.
posted by elphTeq at 2:31 AM on June 14, 2002

Looking back, I think he just took pity on me for being the only person dumb enough to buy dried up slime balls.

I think he's funny.
posted by emf at 3:28 AM on June 14, 2002

Hang on, skallas. So it's 'dated gen-x humor' to write in an amused tone about this stuff, but okay to visit the store's site and be amused by it directly? Treating 'irregular junk as cool' is tired, so we should just treat it as... well, junk? "Here, visit this site and have a look at this junk! Seriously, folks, it's just junk, and there's nothing funny about it. God knows how they make a living selling it. And by the way, if you do happen to find any of it funny, for God's sake don't write about it. No one under the age of thirty is allowed to find anything amusing that we thought was funny first."
posted by rory at 4:30 AM on June 14, 2002

There's this off-putting attitude of perpetuly living in one's childhood which makes this feel even more irrelevant and dated.

I can agree with you there, as long as there's room to appreciate one of the geniuses of the form. There are times it feels like every Gen Xer in the U.S. stopped developing new interests at age 14.
posted by rcade at 5:33 AM on June 14, 2002

"Gen X" was always supposed to be a lame term, an allusion to the inability to really peg that generation with a fitting label, a condition that suits me just fine.

A leave my Transformers alone, dammit!
posted by NortonDC at 6:02 AM on June 14, 2002

OK, someone please tell me the Coke II part was a joke right, about them thinking it's a new product? Please? Because if not, then (a) they're so NOT Gen-X, and (b) it makes me feel really old that there are people who don't remember the Coke II debacle. I still can't get over people who didn't see Star Wars (the original) in the theater...
posted by mkultra at 7:35 AM on June 14, 2002

I like Matt and X-E. He's no seanbaby, but then who is?
posted by GriffX at 7:48 AM on June 14, 2002

Just because no one else will hit this hard-hitting topic straight on, I wanted to add another useless tidbit: this is the coolest store. My mom took me there in 7th Grade to buy prisms for my science project. I came home with five jars of "goop," two 50 cent speakers to wire into my Fisher Price record player (which made it sound worse, go figure), and this metal thing that an older me can only describe as a nipple torture device. Don't think I ever finished that science project, and my nipples have been thanking me ever since.
posted by thebigpoop at 8:21 AM on June 14, 2002

We used to call this place the science center back when it was hidden away on Northwest Highway. It was just about the coolest place for a kid with little money and a lot of imagination. Walking through the aisles (except the one with all the glass items!) with the wood floor creaking. Our grandfather would drive us and he would get so pissed after an hour or so of us looking at each and every little thing in the store.

Then the store moved to it's neew location on Milwaukee and it was never the same. More regular (read non-nerdy) folks started coming in and the store had less little goofy stuff and started having more ready made junk products. We were able to capture the feeling of wonder once again when we visited the AS&S store in one of the southern suburbs but I've heard it has since been shut down.
posted by @homer at 8:34 AM on June 14, 2002

...Dutifully ingnoring all previous comments...

I fucking love it. I wanna go there, now. and write my own web-page thing about it on the inter-net.
fun.
posted by Hackworth at 8:47 AM on June 14, 2002