I remember when my kids were smaller they always wanted me to buy single-serving sizes of everything. Single serve peanut butter. Single serve ranch dressing. Single serve cheese and cracker boxes. Their argument was that it would make things easier for me when it came time to pack their lunches in the morning—instead of me rushing around trying to make sandwiches and whatnot, they could just pack their lunches themselves! My counter argument was that if they were that interested in making things easier for me, then they could pack their own lunches—with sandwiches and whatnot—the night before. I would even show them where the box of whatnots were kept.
I think I also tossed in some Mom Guilt arguments about how single serve containers are bad for the environment, and maybe even made a few cracks about how three baby polar bears slip under the ice and drown every time a Lunchable is opened, but that was more for the fun of making them feel miserable than an actual argument. No, the real reason I was against the pre-packaged, single-serving sized lunches was simply that I was just way too cheap to ever spend four dollars on six little tubs of ranch dressing. Of course, that argument was never going to be as compelling as the baby polar bear argument; especially around Christmas time when Coke would start showing all of those cutesy polar bear commercials, and stuffed baby polar bears (the plush kind—not the real ones) became all the rage.
In the end, it didn’t really matter which argument I choose—as things usually went when they were that young, I won that argument simply because I was the one who did the shopping. Of course, I’m sure that it also didn’t hurt when I pointed out that I didn’t know what kind of Brady Bunch delusion they were living under, but the only time I ever packed them a lunch for school was when we had leftover pizza from the night before. All other times I just signed them up for a school lunch, under the theory that if they were going to complain about/waste/ignore their lunch, than I would rather someone other than me me put the effort into preparing it.
And so that was the end of that. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. What I didn’t realize when I won the single serve argument nearly a decade ago was that asking me to buy them Lunchables was only the opening salvo in that particular war; if anything, the Lunchables argument was a targeting round, designed to get me to show my position so that they could regroup and come up with a better strategy. Which now, nearly ten years later, they have.
Here’s the thing about single serve: just like anything can be disposable, anything can be made into a single serving. That five pound tube of ground beef you bought for this weekend’s barbeque? Take enough hamburger out of it for one patty, fry it up on the stove, and leave the rest of the meat sitting on the counter overnight and voila! Single serve ground beef.
The same goes for the bag of buns: take one out, leave the bag open, and, like magic, the next morning you have a bag of single serve hamburger buns. (Or rather had.)
These days, instead of making the argument that their “single-serve” lifestyle causes baby polar bears to slip under the ice, I instead make the argument that it causes my bank account to slip under. Unfortunately, however, since baby polar bears are still much cuter than my wallet, that argument is as unsuccessful now as it was when they were little.
And just like that, suddenly Lunchables are starting to look like a pretty good option.
Well played, children. Well played.