Soup in what?
New from Campbell's, two kinds of sort-of chicken-noodle soup in K-Cups (for the Keurig hot-beverage system). Yes, you can produce Homestyle Chicken Broth & Noodle Soup or Southwest-Style Chicken Broth & Noodle Soup right in your coffee thingumajig. Campbell's seems not to have considered that, to a large number of people, Southwest is home, but that's another story.
The soup mixes consist of a packet of solids (noodles and vegetables — there is no actual chicken) that you put in your cup, and a KCup containing seasoned chicken broth mix. That could have been included in the envelope, but then there'd be nothing in the KCup. At one discount store, a six-pack of Campbell's new KCups is $6.99, so a cup of KCup soup costs $1.17.
At the same store, a 10 ½-ounce can of Campbell's condensed Chicken Noodle Soup (which contains some chicken) costs $1.59 and makes 21 ounces of soup, so an 8-ounce cup costs 61 cents — half as much. At that store, a box of Lipton Chicken Noodle Soup mix (which also contains some chicken, but fewer and smaller noodles than the K-Cups) costs $1.29. It makes six cups, so a cup costs 22 cents — less than 20 percent of the price of the K-Cup.
Organic soup
Also new from Campbell's is organic Chicken Noodle Soup in a 17-ounce brick pack. At the same store, it sells for $2.79, so an 8-ounce serving is $1.31.
The farce is with us
Mr. Tidbit knows that this isn't his bailiwick. Heck, it isn't even his wheelhouse. But he encountered it among the ads in a newspaper insert that also contained ads for grocery products, and it feels as if it should have been a breakfast cereal or a mac-and-cheese variant. In any case, it's so peculiar that he can't resist passing it along.
It's the Star Wars Makeup Collection, from CoverGirl, and it includes a variety of cosmetic items in black containers with the Star Wars logo. Here's an example, from the CoverGirl website: "Ten limited-edition mascaras with ten unique Star Wars quotes. Collect them all: Five light side quotes and five dark side quotes."
Yes, that's collect-them-all quote-containing mascaras. Mr. Tidbit is sad for his country.
Al Sicherman
