A minty mystery
A few weeks ago, this corner of the newspaper was devoted to my devotion to Junior Mints. I went on and on, 600 words worth, about the minty deliciousness of the Junior; how I regularly visit the Dollar Store to stock up on the slender white boxes; how I keep a row of them in the cabinet to the right of the stove.
I think I broke the Junior supply chain. The week after that column ran, I went to the Dollar Store and found the shelves bare. There were Raisinettes and Whoppers and Sour Patch Kids and all the other chewy things that will remove the last of your fillings. But no Juniors.
Off I scampered to the next town and that Dollar Store. Nada. What was going on? A call to my like-minded Junior-loving friends turned up the same bad news. The Juniors are nowhere to be found, as depleted as shovels before a blizzard.
“Me and my big mouth,” I told my friend Gina, who’d been on the receiving end of my Junior obsession all along. She doubted that my well-meaning yet hardly viral column would cause a run on the Juniors. But wasn’t the timing a bit too coincidental to be a coincidence?
Back at the store, I plucked a couple of Raisinettes off the shelf and a box of Goobers, too. The far inferior sweets would have to suffice until the Juniors were flowing again. While munching the chocolate raisins that night, I went to Amazon to see if they might be able to restock my Junior shelf. Someone was selling a 3.5-ounce box of my loved ones for $9.
If there are 42 Juniors in that box, that would mean someone thought we would pay 21 cents per Junior. Let me tell you, I was tempted, but no. Mental math sent me off balancing the cost of my three morning Juniors with the cost of a postage stamp to mail a letter to the Junior factory to demand answers. It’s a wash.
Amazon did have other Junior options – mints in Easter egg colors. My hand hovered over the “Buy” for a second, but would they taste the same? What kind of chocolate was in that bunny pink stuff? And I would have had to buy about 10 boxes of them. I wanted my old Juniors back.
The Goobers are a poor substitute. While reading one night, I gobbled about half a box of the chocolate-covered peanut bits. I folded the top of the box down and left it on the coffee table. There the box stayed for a couple of days, lingering like an abandoned novel. On my way out the door, I looked at the box and thought, should I put it up so the dog doesn’t get into it? No. It’s not like that’s a box of Juniors.
I returned home to find the box shredded on the floor. Smoothie had climbed up there and finished what was left of the candy. I worried about the chocolate and waited and watched, but he showed no signs of either contrition or tummy trouble. Turns out that’s probably not really chocolate on the peanuts.
I went back to the Dollar Store this week and the Juniors are still AWOL. Meanwhile, Gina sent her husband on a Junior safari, and he found some at Walmart, just four boxes that had escaped the mad Junior rush of 2023. Not wanting to be greedy about things, he bought me three. They’re lined up on the shelf. For now, I’m rationing.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.