In Which I Post Old Ravings...

For my first trick, some stuff I thought of a couple years ago:

I’m going to go on record here. Pink Berry is awful. It’s watery. It’s sour. Yes I’ve had those halfling’s thimble-sized peach-ish colored yogurt drinks with the foil lids, of which Pink Berry is supposed to recall the taste, so settle down. They have them at 99 Ranch. Those are good! And they’re yogurt. Pink Berry is not, and it’s not. I will not complain about the exorbitant price or the lack of flavor choice because of what I’m going to say next:

Red Mango is wonderful. It’s everything I thought Pink Berry was going to be during the period of time between hearing the endless hype, seeing the crowded stores, and actually trying it. True, Red Mango too is expensive and only really offers the one yogurt flavor, that being simply “yogurt” (Advantage: Golden Spoon. They’ve had dozens of flavors since their inception in 1982 with multiples of them being available at any given time and are the purveyors of my favorite to date - birthday cake. Yogurt crazes are cyclical - Hansel, so hot right now. This has all happened before. So although the Asian establishments are duking it out this round, go to the rope-a-dope, Golden Spoon, for your time may yet come again.) but Red Mango’s version is thick, tastes good, and definitely contains yogurt (I guess the jury is still out on Pink Berry, with some claiming it’s just flavor powder containing no active cultures whatsoever). Come to find out Red Mango predates Pink Berry in the motherland; Pink Berry, like many others, is a stateside-only upstart, scrambling for a piece of the pie, that was blessed with a hip location and was subsequently lucky enough to have its product placed in the hands of a couple of celebrities and immortalized on film by the paparazzi.

When I went to Pink Berry, they were playing one song over and over. It had one lyric, and that was “Pink Berry Pink Berry!” repeated. I don’t even have to explain how lame, narcissistic and therefore unprecedented it is for a store to hit you over the head with the advertisement for itself after you’re already inside. “Starbucks Starbucks!” “Jamba Juice Jamba Juice!” “Dashers Dashers!” The green and yellow, semitransparent plastic-y decor and pebbled flooring is perfectly reminiscent of the inside of a shower stall. Red Mango’s interior color scheme is consistent and less manic; refined, even.

Finally, as if I have not already convinced me, the iconoclast of the 21st century frozen yogurt industry, Pink Berry, has deemed that the words in its name be concatenated into one, which I refuse to do. Red Mango remains humbly, respectably “red” and “mango.” Proper English, proper yogurt.

All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom zoom zoom and a boom boom.