I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Sometimes Inexpensive Really Means Cheap

This past weekend when I shopped for groceries, I bought a canister of ice cream/cupcake sprinkles for $0.79. Now, my regular readers might be asking already “I didn’t see that on your impulse buys list, what gives?“. In fact, it was not an impulse buy - I saw them in the Aldi circular the week before and planned on buying them. Putting sprinkles on cupcakes is a fun activity for my son and I to do together and since I haven’t bought any in several years I was almost out. I have to make snack for my son’s preschool class on a regular basis and making something once in a while that my son can be involved in from start to finish for him to bring in (he helps with the mixing once I measure, and the filling of the cupcake tins as well) is a big goal of mine.

Well, I looked at the sprinkles in the store and they looked okay, so I bought a canister of them. Last night, my son had some of the leftover ice cream from my daughter’s birthday party for dessert. I asked him if he wanted some rainbow sprinkles on his ice cream, and he readily agreed. I got the new container of sprinkles out, removed the protective wrapping, and opened the “shaker” side for him to shake some onto his ice cream. He shook…. and shook…. and nothing came out. I took a closer look at the container, and started giggling uncontrollably. So much so, I ran upstairs to where my spouse was giving my daughter a bath to show him what I discovered (after taking the entire cap off and dumping some sprinkles by hand on my son’s ice cream).

The sprinkles are the long, oblong, almost oval shaped type. Well, the holes in the container to dispense them are small circles. If the sprinkles are oriented exactly right, or if they break into very small pieces, they can escape (and with enough shaking, a few do come out), but in general, long ovals do not fit through small circles so the sprinkles are trapped inside the container.

There are two possibilities I can see why this was made in this manner. One, the manufacturer wants us all to get a lot of exercise shaking before we get to eat the treat the sprinkles are intended for. Or two, the container is mass produced to be filled with a number of items and the oval rainbow sprinkles are just a small minority, so the fact that the dispenser isn’t appropriate to dispense them is just the luck of the draw. My money is on two, although number one would be a really clever marketing campaign…

So, sometimes, inexpensive really does mean cheap. I paid a lot less for the sprinkles than I might have for a name brand, but, I have to contend with dispensing them by spoon or palmful and not having a convenient “shake” dispenser for my son to use. Time to sort through my cupboards and see if I have something I can reappropriate to use for the sprinkle-dispensing I guess…

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