God prefers cheap cookies

When I was a kid, my mother — one of the world’s biggest snobs — wouldn’t dream of buying a product that wasn’t a name brand. If it wasn’t advertised on television or on the pages of one of her glossy magazines, the product (laundry soap, snack cakes, pickles, even paper towels) was suspect, not to be trusted. That snobbery even extended to “house brands,” like the A&P chain’s Ann Page or Jane Parker products. Even when she learned that the companies which manufactured her favorite “brand name” products also made the private label stuff for the bigger supermarket chains, she’d have none of it.

Marketing experts would tell you that my mother had, like many shoppers of the 1950s and ’60s, developed brand loyalty: she had her favorite brands and she wouldn’t buy anything else.

In today’s economy, a lot of shoppers (like me, for example) are loyal to our wallets and reach for the cheapest products first. The price was the first thing that attracted me to this box of caramel coconut cookies I found at omne of those discount dollar stores. Only after I marveled at the price did I notice the quasi-religious brand name. Heavenly Rewards? If the name didn’t give me reason to pause, the logo — a golden angelic halo — certainly did. Were these cookies manufactured by a Christian bakery?

That’s a question that still requires an answer. The name of the manufacturer of Heavenly Rewards isn’t listed on the box under the all-important warning:”This product is manufactured on equipment that processes products containing peanuts.” Only the company that distributes the cookie — the Family Dollar stores — is credited on the box.

Heavenly Rewards is one of the private labels for the North Carolina-based Family Dollar chain. The cookie brand is licensed to the chain by the supplier. 

I’ll confess my sin, brothers and sisters: I ate the contents of the whole box in one sitting. They were tasty enough, but not a religious experience.