Let me first say I don’t buy cereal or any product because of the promotions on the packages. I buy cereal that my kids like because I don’t want to get up early and cook them breakfast. If they want Toasty Chunks of High Fructose Corn Sugar Puffs to start their day I’m right there with them, with a spoon.

I tried buying the healthy stuff that tastes like cardboard and is 100% biodegradable but no one eats it and it just takes up space. I can’t even sell that stuff to them mixed with melted marshmallows in a pan. They won’t eat it and the dog won’t either.

I supposed if I had started them on that kind of food when they were little they might have developed a taste for it. I mean hell, if you are hungry enough bark will taste okay. But, I didn’t.

I’m going way off course here.

Dammit.

I didn’t buy this cereal because of the promotion. Even though I could really use a $25,000 kitchen make over that was not the reason I bought this cereal. I know I am not going to win. I know this because I don’t think anyone wins. I think these kinds of promotions are rigged.

cereal promotions, win a new kitchen, contests on cereal boxes,

I’ve never met anyone who won one of these things.

Never.

I’ve never even seen one of my friends on Facebook announce that they won one of these things, and I have a fair amount of friends on Facebook.

Let’s do the math, shall we?

We are a pretty standard family of three. I probably buy two boxes of cereal a week that’s about 104 boxes of cereal a year. I’ve been buying cereal since I was on my own and that has been for the past 26 years. Granted, I was not buying that much cereal before I had kids and Ramen has never had a Win a New Kitchen Promotion or any kind of promotion to my knowledge, so lets say one box of cereal per week for those years before I had kids which would be 8 years.

18 years at 2 boxes per week = 1872 boxes of cereal

8 years at 1 box per week = 416

That’s 2288 boxes of cereal I have purchased in my lifetime.

I suspect that is an average amount for a family with two kids.

I have 1885 friends on Facebook. Of course some of those friends don’t have kids, some of them are retired and no longer feeding kids (though they do have grandchildren), some of those friends wouldn’t dream of eating cereal but some of those friends have way more than 2 kids, and if they have teenagers the numbers sky rocket. I think this is a reasonable if not conservative number.

That works out to 4,312,880 boxes of cereal.

You’d think one of those boxes of cereal would be a winner.

But no, they all have this inside.

Loser, you didn't win the contest, inside of cereal box

Thus leaving us with nothing but shattered dreams of a remodeled kitchen.

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