TCBY - The Colossal Bucket of Yogurt

Pinkberry, Red Mango, Berrywild – you can’t swing a cat without hitting a frozen yogurt joint named after both a fruit and a color these days.  My personal favorite though, a non-chromatic produce name, is Sixteen Handles.  Just like Howie Mandel, and other things we thought were passe, frozen yogurt is back.  Everyone is raving about the variety of flavors and toppings and “OMG! It’s YOGURT”, but all I can think is….Are we really doing this again?

You young’uns out there might think these chains are the newest thing.  No, along with neon and layering brightly colored tube socks, frozen yogurt is a recycled trend of the 80s.  And can we talk about what a disaster neon and three layers of tube socks are on a Irish complected girl with heavier legs?  My neon pink sweatshirt added to the day-glo quality of my white skin, which I did not think was humanly possible, and the socks obscured the only thin part of my legs.   I clomped around the halls of my middle school, a blinding, be-cankle-ed spectacle.  Beating them off with a stick, I was.

But back to the frozen confections.

Frozen yogurt fell out of favor when we all started eating protein and fat again in 2000.  Fro-yo was a foolish mistake from the past you thought was good for you, like the guy you dated who was really successful, but super-boring. And like many regretful choices, with some time and distance, we wondered if we shouldn’t give it another shot.  Pinkberry started us all back on the road to low-fat nirvana.  I, for one, was intrigued by the fact they used actual fruit as toppings, instead of the overly processed “froot toppings” of yore.  Maybe this stuff could actually be healthy.  Maybe these new places had it right - fresh ingredients and portion control.  Then one of the two execs still working for TCBY accidentally left her Susan Powter autobiography at home and, forced to read an US Weekly at the dentist office, saw celebrities pairing frozen yogurt with paparazzi.  “We’re baaaack!!!!”, she screamed into her Motorola StarTAC while simultaneously wondering if she could still get her Palm Pilot out of hock.  

TCBY, or The Country’s Best Yogurt, for the uniformed, was the Mecca of low-fat dairy.  Please kind sir, give me thirty-two ounces of reduced fat, frozen dairy with sprinkles, graham crackers crumbs, and those chocolate crunchy things.  All also low-fat – BONUS!  Back in the day, I smugly looked over my bucket of virtuousness at H eating his two scoops of, GASP!, real ice cream, knowing I had made the wiser choice.  The fact that my pants were tight was clearly the fault of the dry cleaner.

So now TCBY, and other chains like it, are riding the coattails of modern places like Pinkberry, using their popularity to try and recapture their market.  Kind of how Glee made Journey think they should tour with that creepy Filipino singer.  Except now, it's even worse (kind of like Journey).  Not only can customers fool themselves into believing what they are eating is healthy, and therefore practically calorie fere, but now they can serve themselves buckets of this stuff and pay by weight.  Buying desserts by the pound seems sad and wrong. Like buying hemorrhoid cream in bulk.

So here we go again.  Women in hoards, denying themselves real frozen dairy products, in favor of buckets of crap.  If you are on a diet, and this gets you by on your way to your goal weight, knock yourself out.  But if the cross section of people I'm seeing at my local mall's TCBY is an accurate representation, there are going to be a lot of women who were at their healthy weight who need new pants.

And let's be honest, this is what you go in ready to order:

But, 99% of the time, this is what you walk out with:

I've been there, sister.