Wednesday, December 2, 2009
7:30 PM
Great Shakes!
Best snack drink EVER and I do mean EVER. NOTHING compares to the delicious, scrumptuous, I-wake-up-thinking-about-them taste of the chocolate Great Shake. They came out when I was really little. I can't remember for absolute certain, but I don't THINK I was even in school just yet but if I was, I wasn't very far along. I loved them more than I could possibly express to you. I don't know what it is that they put in the recipe, but it was amazing.
Great Shakes came in their own two-tone brown shaker cup. There were four packets of the powder inside of the brown shaker cup and the whole thing cost $1.00. Considering the fact that school lunches cost .30 at that time, a dollar for a snack drink that served only four was a little steep but believe me, these were worth every penny. My mom bought them pretty regularly but sometimes I had to wait a few days in between shopping trips. That was excrutiating because they were so good that my mouth literally watered every time I thought about them. So if I had $1.00 of my own, I would sometimes use it to buy a box of Great Shakes to get me through to my mom's next grocery shopping trip. I preferred spending my money on them to spending it on toys and at that time, $1.00 would buy a pretty snazzy toy. You just have no idea how delicious these things really were. You can't even begin to imagine.
I don't know what happened to them. They were only on the market for about a year around here before they quietly disappeared without explanation. I was heartbroken. I have had a lot of really terrific chocolate drinks in my life but none so good that I have stopped pining away for my beloved Great Shakes. I still look for them online, and in stores, hoping that one day maybe, just maybe, they will show back up as mysteriously as they disappeared. That will likely never happen but I continue to hope, nonetheless.
So General Mills! Are you listening? I've been reading comments from a lot of other baby boomers online who likewise miss the most tasty treat you EVER put on the market. PLEASE! I BEG of you! Bring back the Great Shakes!!!! And give me the name and address of the moronic brain child within your company who made the senseless decision to pull them from the shelves. My tastebuds have four decades worth of deprivation to discuss with him.