Products for making life easy actually make us lazy
COMMENTARY
Kelly Morris

No matter what age or gender, we all struggle with some level of stress in our lives and are looking for a magic pill — one that relieves our worries and brings order to our chaos — all in one dose. It’s called a magic pill for a reason. It doesn’t exist.

But some companies are rushing pell-mell to take stress out of our lives by making things more convenient for us. Too convenient, if you ask me.

Take, for example, the newest product from IronKids Bread: Crustless bread. I was shocked when I heard the radio advertisement. I couldn’t believe a product like it could exist. On its Web site, the company says there is no fuss when there is no crust. It also says there is no hassle and waste with crustless bread.

When I consider the hassles in my life, removing bread crust doesn’t even make the Bottom 10 list. And if parents are buying this bread for their children, they aren’t even giving them the opportunity to taste and maybe even enjoy the crust, let alone know what it looks like on bread.

IronKids Crustless bread is just one example of many supposed convenience products gone amok. Next time you go to the grocery store, look for pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in circular shapes in the frozen food aisle or your favorite cereal and milk together in one package in the dairy section.

There’s also a trend to have such snacks as yogurt, pudding, applesauce and Jell-O in eat-on-the-go plastic tubes instead of plastic cups. And the madness doesn’t stop there.

Pre-moistened cleaning cloths are now available with just about any cleaning product you can think of on them. I guess grabbing a paper towel and a Windex bottle to clean the windows, like tearing off beard crust, is too difficult a task.

It is good that product companies are attempting to manufacture convenience, but by doing so, they are producing lazy consumers. We’re already a lazy society. We sit in front of our televisions for hours on end, not willing to change the channel unless we have the television remote in our hand. Pre-packaged convenience is just making the problem worse.

And the consumers buying these products are spending more money for no added benefits. A recent trip to a Tom Thumb grocery store helped me prove that.

Twenty-four slices of IronKids Crustless bread, which looks quite strange in its package, costs $2.59. Twenty-four slices of regular bread costs 99 cents.

Smuckers Uncrustables, the frozen, pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cost $2.39. A loaf of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly costs $3.97. You could get at least 12 sandwiches out of that.

Twenty-five Windex wipes cost $3.29. A one-quart bottle of Windex and 80 paper towels cost $3.48.

Six General Mills breakfast bars cost $3.19. A 32-oz bag of Coco-Puffs and a gallon of milk cost $5.38.

Campbell’s Soup at hand, soup you drink straight from the container, costs $1.59. The equivalent in a can costs 99 cents.

If the cost of convenience doesn’t get you, the taste should. How do you think a thawed out peanut butter and jelly sandwich tastes? What about the breakfast bars that contain both cereal and milk in each individually wrapped package? Way too sweet for my taste.

Companies are forgetting what they’re eliminating by their supposed convenience. They think they are eliminating stress. I think they are eliminating important childhood memories. Gone are the mornings where you sit around the breakfast table with your family and eat your favorite cereal, mine’s Frosted Flakes, and look for the free toy in the bottom of the box.

Gone are the days where you eat pudding with friends and enjoy licking the spoon. Gone are the days where you make your own peanut butter and jelly sandwich, causing the peanut butter and jelly to leak from the sandwich’s sides. Gone is the joyous annoyance of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.

People may not slave away in the kitchen as earlier generations did, but everyone should be able to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on regular bread — with the crust still intact.

Kelly Morris is a junior news-editorial journalism major from Arlington.