What Would You Do…for a Better Product Design?

The fact that Klondike bars are still such a terrible example of product design here in the freshly born year of 2011 boggles the mind.

I have recently acquired a few packs of Klondike bars (for my lovely UK readers, I believe ya’ll call it a Choc Ice).  It’s a sneaky attempt to get my body to be satisfied with one succinct 250-calorie ice cream treat.   If I succeed, I can eliminate my constant desire to down entire pints of it, thereby eliminating a significant portion of my calorie intake.

You know you’re truly overweight when just changing the type of ice cream you eat can make you thinner.

And I’ll admit that so far it’s a pretty good tactic.   What’s not going over so well, however, is the last 4 bites of every single Klondike bar. Why is it that after all these years a better method has not been developed?  I get the whole ice-cream-bar-without-a-stick thing.  But I have to admit that the fact that Klondike bars are stickless is not the reason I’m attracted to them.  In fact, when I’m tonguing the last 4 bites out of the foil wrapper and the melted ice cream from the inside of the foil is folded over and all over my hands, I feel filthy and degraded enough to just not buy them anymore.

Listen, when people got annoyed with popsicles melting and plopping all over the sidewalk in the summer, some brilliant product developers blessed us all with the Push-Pop, which was amazing and yummy and well-worth however much money it cost my mother when I was a young whippersnapper.   When people got tired of milk cartons smushing all together at the opening, they were forced to try again on the other end and this ultimately resulted in millions of cartons everywhere being poked and prodded with forks and knives after the failed triangle method.  But some lovely product developers came along and put a hole and a lid on the top instead.    So where’s the soon-to-be-famous boy genius that’s going to look at the Klondike bar and finally realize it’s ridiculous to have Americans everywhere licking and slopping up the last few bites of its deliciousness?

Let’s take a look at how much attention the Klondike folks have paid to this problem.  Here’s the product back in the early 1900’s:

Image courtesy of Klondikebar.com

And here’s what they look like now:

Image courtesy of my freezer

So what’s the deal, Klondike?  I demand answers.  Because after I get to the bottom of these Double Chocolate Goodness Bars, there’s a miniscule chance that I will be too tired and degraded from licking the foil wrapper to finish the 2nd pack still waiting for me.   And if you don’t come up with some kind of hope before then, I might revert to Ben & Jerry’s pints.

That will severely hinder my pudding loss project. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, food, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011