Digging For Cereal Prizes
I’m not sure when this practice started, but it has got to stop. Right. Now.
What I’m all up in arms about is the fact that cereal companies are getting into the habit of placing their prizes inside of the cereal boxes, but packaged and placed along side the interior cereal bag. This, IMHO, completely strips away the thrill of digging into the cereal itself and hunting for the elusive toy.
We all had our own special ways of extracting the prize from inside a freshly opened box of cereal. As a child I preferred the “hold the box at a 45° angle, push in against the box to create a hand space, then dig in from the bottom” method. Others opted for the less refined “bum rush the box by slamming your arm up to the elbow and muscle the toy out” approach. If you weren’t hip to either technique you could find a large bowl and dump the entire contents and simply pick out the prize. This last approach was deemed the cowards way of obtaining the prize, and was considered bad form around our household 
But I guess this is all becoming moot, with Kellogg’s now pre-separating the prize from the cereal itself, these and other self-taught prize extracting techniques might go the way of Pound Puppies, Speak & Spells, and “flesh” colored crayons. We’re denying future generations of children by not allowing them the pleasure of digging deep into a box Froot Loops, bits and pieces of cereal oozing out of the box as they stare at the ceiling in total concentration, hoping to feel their way to the prize that looked so cool printed on the outside of the box.
*Sigh* It’s an example of another small of piece of my childhood dying by carefully measured increments.
