Peter Pan

The "Valuejet" Of The Peanut Butter Business...


Well, I just finished eating a nice "Jiff" peanut butter sandwich this morning in anticipation of making an early morning trip over to Lowes' to pick up some supplies for today's construction session.

I topped my fake peanut butter sandwich off with a nice glass of some 1/2% milk that Pat insists on buying, augmented with some of my "fake half & half" which I rescued at the last minute from last evening's trashcan because I wanted to actually taste the product in order to thoroughly condemn it in my writing.

Let's just say that the experience was almost satisfying.

I HATE Jiffy and Jiff and Barfy and Biff and any other form of peanut butter other than the original, the best, the only brand that has voluntarily graced the shelves of my family's pantry since at least 1959....

PETER PAN PEANUT BUTTER.

Of course, just in case you were living in a cave or doing time on the International Space Station over the past six months or so you would know that Conagra Foods had a little problem with some salmonella contamination last winter and as a result they had to recall all of the Peter pan Peanut Butter on the entire planet.

Every single jar, EXCEPT the one that is still happily residing in my pantry this morning.

The only problem for me is that there is only a couple of spoons full of peanut butter left in the jar, and as a result I'm hanging onto the jar and the peanut butter contained therein until I can again buy a new jar.

I may just start some kind of shrine in my home and place my jar of Peter Pan Peanut Butter right there in the middle.

In checking the Conagrafoods Website, I found that in fact the Sylvester, Georgia plant responsible for converting south Georgia and south Alabama peanuts into my beloved creamy, smooth, peanut butter like I've eaten nearly my body weight in over each and every one of the past 47 years, is being rebuilt and will be back on line later this summer.

Of course the public , in their normal Lemming fashion, has stampeded away from not only the Peter Pan brand, but in some cases every brand of peanut butter over the past few months.

I just hope that they don't cave in to public opinion and change the name of the peanut butter or do a Coke maneuver and try to change the formulation in this revitalization process.

I want my peanut butter back on the store shelves, with the same label, even though it is in a plastic jar rather than a glass jar like in the old days.

Remember back in the mid 1990's when a little southern airline called Valuejet had a DC-9 take a nosedive into the Everglades outside of Miami?

Practically everyone I know was freaking out as I continued to happily fly with Valuejet and enjoy the savings on flights out of Atlanta over the fares charged by Delta and the other major airlines.

Today that little airline is known as Airtran, and today Airtran has one of the most modern fleets of aircraft in the industry. They also haven't lost a single other airplane since that fateful day in 1995.

I intend to apply the same strategy in making decisions regarding Peanut Butter that I employed in selecting an airline...

Keep the Status Quo...

So my advise to you is to go out and buy yourself some Conagra stock, and while you're at it, would someone buy me a couple of cases of Peter Pan Peanut Butter?

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