The grandson of the inventor of Reese’s just called the candy garbage. 

He used to eat them everyday, but now he’s done.

While some are outraged that Reese’s has swapped out peanut butter for peanut butter crême, the real outrage is how our culture has done similar things to us all. 

In response to his outrage, Reese’s HQ replied that their original peanut butter cup remains unchanged. It still uses real peanut butter. They only made the change to their seasonal and non-core chocolates.

Peanut butter is thick and difficult to mold into hearts and Easter bunnies and other shapes, they said, switching to crême was a manufacturing decision. The CIO defended this saying they performed extensive consumer testing and the flavor is identical to most people. Since the change hit the market, people continue to eat them with virtually no complaints about flavor.

This is not the first time Reese’s has done this. Years ago they quietly abandoned using “milk chocolate” and now use “chocolate candy.” You can deep dive into the differences on your own, but I’ll bet it will take more time than the time you didn’t spend to bother reading the packaging on the candy wrapper.

My guess is you didn’t notice it, did you? Me either.

Even if we did, we would’ve chalked it up to marketing. 

Seriously, who reads anything except the Brand name? We just want to make sure we don’t buy some other knockoff brand. Knockoffs use cheap ingredients like fake chocolate and fake peanut butter.

Oh, wait…

We expect Reese’s to use better quality ingredients than the store brand and other knockoffs. This justifies the brand name charging higher prices. You get what you pay for, the saying goes.

So what caused them to change the original, successful recipe? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? True, unless you’re too broke to keep it the same. 

It started with cocoa prices increasing, and now apparently even peanuts are too expensive.

George Washington Carver’s legacy, plus decades of technological innovation should’ve made it easier to reap a bountiful harvest of peanuts and distribute it around the world. We should be getting more with less effort. The gains from technology should be reducing the effort and therefore the cost. 

But inflation.

Prices don’t rise randomly. Inflation is not a natural phenomenon. It is a system doing what it was designed to do. 

The games the Central Bank plays trying to control the supply and behavior of money causes prices to rise forever. Because companies are incentivized to join the game – borrow today and pay it off “in the future” – they are stuck in a trap. No matter what, prices always increase.

They pass their increased costs on to consumers. But eventually consumers can’t afford it. So the business has to find ways to make a better product (add value) or cut costs.

They either lay people off, or they find cheaper raw materials. For Reese’s that meant no more milk chocolate. That worked for a while, but costs kept rising. They cut costs and increased pricing until they had to do the unthinkable. 

Now they use fake peanut butter and mold it into cute little shapes. They don’t call it cutting costs. Instead they call it adding value through innovation. That IS marketing. They have made industrial sludge attractive and delicious. 

This easily spreads (pun intended) into other areas of our lives. This candy company’s willingness to compromise the integrity and legacy their brand also happens in every other industry. It bleeds into our psychology, morals and relationships.

Our culture tolerates cheap and fake so long as it looks good and makes us feel good for a little while. We are increasingly less willing to slow down and read the packaging and determine what it means and how it will effect us.

Love is love, right? Who cares if it now it contain less commitment and more selfishness. Who cares if it is not an exclusive relationship with the purpose of having children and building a stable home and community. Who cares what the other person actually believes. The packaging is attractive and the experience is dope(amine)!

It pleases me now. It’s Love - the brand we’ve come to know and trust for all of humanity’s existence!

But in a year or two (or less), when we have painful physical, mental, spiritual and financial ailments, we’ll blame inflation aka that’s just how life works.

The problem is we’ve substituted the real and costly for what cheaper and convenient.

The same symptoms appear in other areas of life, from education to manufacturing to so many others.

It is hard work to develop morals and convictions. Another way to say it is it is expensive. Morals and convictions are what inform, shape and give value to our life and decisions. Their quality determines the quality of everything else we create with our lives.

When begin to substitute our once-held convictions with ideas that are more convenient and easier to mold to justify doing what we want to do, we sacrifice integrity, quality and legacy.

And then we deceive ourselves by calling it being progressive. This is akin to Reese’s calling what they’re doing “innovation.”

Our culture has become very “innovative” over the last couple decades. And we’re too busy, ignorant or complicit to call it out.

We may not condone it, but we tolerate it. We tolerate lying, we tolerate cheating, we tolerate all kinds of things in the name of progress.

It gets tested a few times in a few non-essential areas of life, telling white lies for example, and if nobody seems to be bothered, we tinker with other areas that allow us to get what we want easier and faster. It doesn’t cost us as much, so we think. Nobody notice and everyone is still happy. 

But it is all a symptom of a deeper issue.

It becomes a trap because next time we have to make further concessions and eventually do things we never imagined (like Reese’s not using real peanut butter)!

We pay the price in the long term – in our health, trust, relationships, and ultimately in ourselves.

Everyone begins to believe this is the path to happiness and prosperity, only to discover they’ve traded their legacy for peanuts.

When the focus is only on profit margin and taste (getting what you want in the short-term), not virtue, excellence and authenticity, everything degrades. Nothing is sacred. Nothing lasts.

The root cause is an unwillingness to pay the full price and do the hard work to build or acquire something authentic and durable. The root cause is selfishness, pride, and being irresponsible. Some would call it cowardice.

The Central Bank’s fiat money scheme drains the value from our wallets and leaves us with peanuts.

Subjective morality and being “progressive” doesn’t just hurt us economically, it hoodwinks us into tolerating what is worth less. It destroys what was once loved and cherished and trusted. 

It hollows out our souls. 

Some will disagree, but the proof is in the peanut butter.