The More Things Change...
Ah, those hardscrabble early days of SFist, when we couldn't decide what to call ourselves and the only hot tips we got were on strange new candy flavors in the San Francisco Chronicle's vending machines.
Close to two years later, we've resigned ourselves to the inevitable fisting jokes and are getting honest to goodness insider information, which suddenly sounds related by juxtaposition, but we're sure its not.
But some things never change, as our first and most favorite Chronicle insider sent us a picture of a new candy in the Chronicle vending maching, Garfield ChocoBites by Argentinean company Arcor. According to this article excerpt (hey, we're bloggers, do we really need to read the whole thing?) from Professional Candy Buyer Magazine (on second thought, screw this blogging thing -- we wanna become a professional candy buyer!) Arcor entered into a licence agreement involving mind-bogglingly cutting-edge cartoon character Garfield in September 2004, which makes us wonder if these "Garfield appoved: limited edition" peanut M&M rip-offs have been sitting in an Argentinean warehouse since shortly thereafter.
We got our source on the telephone and asked him/her to taste the candy for us ("you seriously want me to eat some?") After grumbling "This doesn't go with my diet today", they gamely dove in and said "It sure doesn't taste American, but after a couple hundred of them I'm sure you can't taste the difference."
If we were really mean, here's where we'd some sort of remark about how that's the kind of attitude that's made the Chronicle the instution it is today, but our concern for what this signifies regarding the health of the paper overrides our desire to snark. Are things really so bad over there that they can only afford to stock their vending machines with sub-par snacks? We thought they were hiring! OK, fine, our desire to snark isn't completely overridden.