Old & Original vs. New & Improved

Is it just me? Or have you also noticed that the very moment you find something you really, really love - a shampoo that doesn't make it look like you slept in a food service hair net, a lipstick in the perfect shade of red, a laundry detergent that doesn't leave your clothes smelling like fertilizer ... the company goes and changes the formula?

Like me, do you now live in fear of the words "New and Improved"? Do you shake your head and wonder, where is the "new" and heaven help us, where is the "improved"?

Case in point: I have been buying Columbo Low Fat Plain yogurt in 32 ounce containers since, well, for so long I can't even remember when I started. So I hit the grocery store this week to pick up my weekly 4 container stash, and here I discover that the cool little label with the old fashioned barn and the friendly looking cow has changed. It's still a barn and it's still a cow, but it looks somehow different - kind of like a high tech barn and some sort of automated looking high tech cow. But I figure hey, it's a label change, what could be the harm? So naive.

Once at home, I taste the yogurt. My BLEECH was heard across the neighborhood. I flipped the container and looked at the ingredient label. I wasn't sure. It looked like similar ingredients ...but maybe not.

I dug into the kitchen garbage where just this morning I tossed the empty container from last week and I had, as Oprah would call it, my A HA moment! There was my proof. They had changed the formula. There it was again ...new and improved.

Not only that, but in the process they added a half gram of fat per serving and more saturated fat. And, ended up with a taste remarkably reminiscent of chalky diarrhea medicine only in semi-solid form . With more acid. Go figure.

But yucky tasting breakfast food and disappointed taste buds aside, this experience did get me thinking about this whole new and improved thing, which, as you know, isn't really just about yogurt. Or shampoo. Or laundry detergent. In a strange kind of way it's also about what each of us is doing every single day when we turn away from that fabulous 40 something face in the mirror, deciding "new and improved" would be better.

Wrinkle injections. Line fillers. Plastic surgery. Face peels. New and improved? Sometimes. But not always.

Which is not to say I'm against self improvement. Heaven's no! When improvement is what you really get.

But just like in aisle four or the frozen food section, sometimes "new and improved" isn't really new and improved at all - maybe just a little bit different. And sometimes, like my beloved Columbo yogurt, not better at all.

So I guess what I'm really saying here is that as you stand on that threshold of deciding whether to spend your hard earned dollars on temporary wrinkle injections aimed at giving you that "new and improved " look for a few months - OR - taking that fabulous summer vacation bound to net you a pocketful of memories to last a lifetime, give a little extra thought to taking that vacation looking just the way you are.

Because the truth is, as it goes in the supermarket, so too it goes in life: Sometimes, "old and original" is just as good as "new and improved". And sometimes even better.