BANGKOK – Snack-loving foreign tourists in Thailand expressed outrage this week when it was discovered that the popular cheese-flavored puffs were no longer available for purchase at local convenience store outlets including 7-Eleven, Family Mart, Tesco Lotus, Fresh Mart and CJ Express, among others.
Brunhilde Vilmacher, a 62-year-old former backhoe operator from Geirstaken, Austria, was crestfallen to find that her favorite corn-puffed nosh doodles had been removed from the shelves of her favorite 7-Eleven in Hua Hin.
“I came in here thinking, ‘Ya, after a long day on the hot beach I sure would love to indulge in maybe a cold can of Coke and of course some crunchy Cheetos because this is how I do it back home when I get these munchie feelings,” Vilmacher explained. “But then I look around — Doritos, Pringles, many other crisps and snacks even from Austria… but no Cheetos!”
“The only feeling I can liken this gut-punch to is when I was a schoolchild and our teacher broke the news to us that Hitler was actually Austrian and only moved to Germany because he needed a more gullible people to lead into historic infamy.”
“What is even more outrageous is they have obviously replaced the real Cheetos with some cheap ‘Euro’ brand of puffed cheesery,” Vilmacher added, pointing directly at the imposter brand — now prominently displayed in the exact spot where the Cheetos packs had previously nestled — promising that she and her vacay-loving group of Austrian retirees would be taking to the streets of Hua Hin to demand the return of the top-selling amuse-bouches.
An investigation by Breaking In Asia staff found that convenience stores in Bangkok, Koh Samui, Phuket, Hua Hin and Chiang Mai had all replaced their Cheetos offerings with the “Euro” brand puffed corn crisps.
Although a manager at one of the shops attributed the Cheetos’ benching to a licensing issue between Cheetos’ maker Frito Lay and its Thai joint-venture partner, Chulalongkornsnacks Inc., he also indicated that packs of both Crunchy Cheetos and Cheetos Puffs were available for sale on Bangkok’s notorious black market or at his Hua Hin village home, if you would care to follow him via scooter on his way home from work to make a deal.
An English tourist seen noshing on the Euro Cheetos, Sam Kenworthy, also, unsurprisingly, 62 and a flautist from the greater Guildford metropolitan area, somehow blamed the real Cheetos’ unavailability on the Brexit crisis currently embroiling the Continent. “They taste like trash, but snackers need to adjust to the new market realities,” Kenworthy pronounced before expounding on his larger argument that intertwined global markets had had a catastrophic effect on his daily diet anyway, and so what did it matter if he ate the highly caloric original Cheetos or the cardboard-inflected Euro offering.
“A snack’s a snack, bruh,” he said.
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