Quaker Granola Bars

Extreme couponer initiative is what America needs

Of all the unusual types of people reality TV has brought into the American mainstream, the most fascinating has to be extreme couponers.

Sure, the British gypsies on "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding" are pretty great too, but I'm not totally convinced they wouldn't kill me, eat me and use my bones to play baseball.

Hoarders, pageant families, pickers and pawners – while interesting, and some more train wreck worthy than others – just don't do it for me like the extreme couponers do.

The couponers are actually like the reality show all-star team. They're part hoarder and part picker, with the obsessiveness of the pageant parents.

To watch them work – using a stack of coupons and to turn a $1,000 grocery bill into $1.50 – is like watching magic.

They seem to have piqued America's interest too. The extreme couponers are getting profiled all over the news, showing off their basement stockpiles of two year's worth of shampoo and hundreds of boxes of macaroni and cheese.

It's the club every would-be savvy shopper wants to join. Heck, just last week The Bee hosted a class teaching locals the way of extreme couponing.

Still, I can't help but wonder if we, as a people, are using these extreme couponing wizards to the best of their abilities.

I view them as hundreds of Luke Skywalkers working on Tatooine when they could be out destroying Death Stars.

They could have handled all the debt ceiling hub-bub much quicker and more efficiently than all the bumbling politicians in Washington.

Give 'em a year or so in charge, and not only would America be out of debt, but I'm sure we'd have enough toilet paper and cereal saved up for every American to use for an entire year.

You might call that socialism. Extreme Couponers call it success.

While they're at it, the couponers could easily be charged with feeding the homeless. Heck, they might even be able to build temporary places to stay out of granola-bar boxes and the hundreds of bottles of glue they got on sale, even though their kids don't need it for school yet.

Toss the penny-pinching couponers into the sports realm, and watch them negotiate new labor deals with ease. That NFL lockout that lasted months, and the current NBA lockout, would have both been over quicker than you can spell Quaker.

Athletes would get multi-million-dollar bonuses based on scoring enough points or a certain number of touchdowns – but if they did it on Triple-Your-Bonus Sundays, they would get three times the amount.

Quaker Granola Chewy Smashbar | we-rate-stuff.com

Maybe it’s just me, but all granola bars taste the same. Doesn’t really matter what flavor it is, whether it’s peanut butter, peanut butter and jelly, chocolate, cookie dough, or curry, which I don’t think exists, but in the interest of making a point I’ll pretend it does. It still tastes like a granola bar. As you can probably tell, I’m not the biggest fan of granola bars. When they change the fundamental ingredients, however, that gets my attention.

Quaker’s newest granola creation is the Chewy Smashbar. I guess they call it a Smashbar because they smashed the two new ingredients, graham crackers and pretzels, together. Despite the naturality of the three main ingredients – granola, graham crackers, and pretzels – they still rely on artificial flavors. For shame, Quaker. You used to be such a wholesome guy.

The fake flavors are obvious, too. The first bite I took tasted like a graham cracker, but as I continued to chew, the flavor got more and more intense. Way more intense than a normal graham cracker, and it had a strange, slightly off-putting vanilla flavor. The graham cracker pieces were chewy too, instead of crunchy as they normally are. I don’t know if they were just stale or if this is what they’re trying to pass as a graham cracker. I also can’t believe how many times I’ve said graham cracker in this paragraph. Let’s start a new one, shall we?

There are a few good things about this Smashbar. I’m slightly surprised, but the chocolate is actually real. Most cheap snacks of this nature would use some waxy, gross chocolate, but the Quaker chose to use some fine semi-sweet for this. In addition to the sweet flavors of the graham crackers and chocolate, the pretzels were a nice touch. They add a salty, crunchy texture to the granola bar, and if there’s one thing granola bars are usually lacking, it’s texture. And flavor.

I’d probably eat this over normal granola bars, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy either. The added texture makes for a more interesting snack, but it’s still nothing special. I’m glad they’re at least headed in the right direction, adding more variety to their snacks, but I’m afraid the Smashbar isn’t going to turn me into a Quaker.

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