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.
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.
Thus leaving us with nothing but shattered dreams of a remodeled kitchen.
With my luck I’d win it and then be all, like, “I live in a one bedroom apartment so, you know, NEVER MIND.”
This is why I just eat bacon.
Add me to your list of people who eat tons of cereal and yet have never won anything from the promotions they advertise on said boxes of cereal. This is also true for boxes of cookies, crackers, and any other food box that claims I could be a winner. Liars. 🙁
Don’t even get me started on the M&M bags!
Send me the box, I will eat it. I love boxes. Then I will send you the poop and you can mail it to the company to express your opinion. Nothing like goat poop for expressing opinions.
My kids were lucky to get dry toast for breakfast. With the crust. Sometimes we’d buy 20# bags of “Kibbles & Bits” add a little lumpy Carnation Instant Low Fat Dry Milk and call it breakfast. They were grateful. 🙂
We had something similar. My dad made Ralston cereal for us each morning. It was like oatmeal and it was made by Purina, the same people who make dog food http://www.hotralston.com/history.htm. Num!
I haven’t seen that. Guess I buy the wrong cereal, but what would it matter. Like you said, who wins those anyway. I do good if I get a coupon for $1 off my next box.
I like those coupons, I put them on my fridge until they expire and then I remember I have them.
No kids in our house, but we have at least six boxes of cereal in our cupboard at a time! I eat it for breakfast and at night. In all my years of buying food I have never won anything from any promotional packaging. What I have won is millions of dollars from someone in Nigeria, who needs my bank details in order to deposit it.
The least the bastards could do is put a coupon in the box with a buck off on your next purchase. I mean, really — we like to get kissed when we get screwed.
Yes we do!
I’ve never won anything! Period. So the way I figure it…One of us is DUE.. Good Luck!
That comment almost makes me want to go out and get a few more boxes. Almost.
If you eat Cheerios every day you win lower cholesterol.
The only thing I ever found in a box of cereal was cereal. Except once, when I found a bug.
Ewww!
We eat Cheerios but I still take a statin.
They need to start putting toys back inside boxes of cereal. Wasn’t it awesome ripping the box open, plunging your filthy 10-year-old paw down into the cereal searching for the toy that broke 20 minutes after you fished it out of the fruit loops?
Man, those were the days.
Loved the toys! Nothing was better then getting a real Hot Wheels car, even if you didn’t play with toy cars, it was cool because they were real toys and not something that broke in 30 seconds.
I never thought anyone really won those contests either. I thought it was a scam, but when I was a kid our local grocery store had a contest to win a complete pool outfit. My next door neighbor won. Yes, right next door. I watched as the pool went up and I even got to swim in it a few times.
My mom only bought the nasty cardboard stuff – I buy the sugary, crappy stuff for my kids but once the boys hit their teens they ate too much and I ended up having to buy way to much milk and cereal – TONS of cereal and every time I saw that “SORRY” on the inside of the box I said I wouldn’t buy it again – but I still do and even though I tell myself I don’t give a shit I always end up looking to see if I won.
I’ve wondered about that, if maybe in my disgust I have thrown away a box
that was actually a winner. I doubt it but maybe.
Wow. That works out to 4,312,880 boxes of cereal? That’s a lot of friggen cereal, and no winners? Totally rigged.
These prizes only go to people who just happen to… once in their life… get a box of cereal by mistake…. and find the winning ticket inside. Lucky bastards! Now I’m craving some Lucky Charms.
I wonder if they are all people like me who never check the inside of the box to see if they won anything. I am sure if there are winners many of them end up in the trash. I go through cereal kicks and I never look at the promotions.
Those were some serious numbers you were crunching up there, Jen..lol. I never expected, so I never won. Back home in Nigeria I always wanted to win those Kellog trips or book tokens but there was always that itty-bitty sentence – only residents of USA qualify. and there I was thinking ..lucky people :)..
It seems to me your chances of winning were just as good as ours was in the
US.