I’m a sucker for almost any novelty food on the market. Pickle soda? You bet. Cotton candy grapes? Sign me up. Balsamic ice cream? I’ll take three scoops. So, last month, when I heard that Pringles was releasing an everything bagel flavor, I knew it was my duty to try and secure the snack.
According to the Pringles website , the chip is supposed to have “flavor notes of sesame and poppy seeds followed by hints of cream cheese that perfectly blend with toasted onion and garlic.” Which, to my wrecked palate, is a pretty tame combination of flavors, especially given the everything bagel craze of the past few years (partially thanks to the Trader Joe’s seasoning that lets you make practically anything taste like a morning deli run).
Since the snack was declared a limited edition item, I knew in order to test out the chips, time was of the essence. However, when I looked around at my local grocery store, there weren’t any everything bagel Pringles to be found.
At first, I wasn’t too thrown off. After all, I live in New York, the bagel aficionado’s natural habitat — maybe they just sold out.
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To widen my search, I went to the official Pringles site where they have a handy function that tells you if a product is stocked in your area. But, as soon as I put in my search address, I got this crushing result: There was no product to be found. No chips anywhere near Brooklyn? An alleged Metropolitan area? It seemed too strange to me.
I then asked my coworkers in Florida and New Jersey to try locating the chips near them, but no luck. I even messaged my friend on the West Coast to search for the chips in the carb-starved southern California area and we still drew a blank.
How could this be? From Cuban sandwiches to Korean barbecue, I see a chip lover’s darkest and wildest fantasies populating the shelves daily. Are everything bagel Pringles really that in demand? Did some shadowy collector swipe all of them as soon as they hit the market in order to upsell, like an Eras Tour ticket?
I began to feel defeated, unworthy of my self-proclaimed status of “novelty chip sucker.” Then it occurred to me: What if this is all a hoax?
When looking up the chips online, almost zero reviews come up, just basic announcements of their supposed existence. On the Pringles site, there are actually only two customer reviews: one from a user named “Pringles Fan” and the other named “Popcorn” who both demand that we should “buy the chips immediately.” Sounds a little suspicious, no? If only we could, Popcorn!
I promise I’m not your everyday conspiracy theorist, but I’ll be honest, I’m at a loss. It just doesn’t feel right. Why would Pringles do this to us? Everything bagels have been enjoyed by New York Jews since the 80s. A bagel-flavored chip just isn’t clickbait-y enough to warrant the theatrics of a full fake marketing campaign. Or the scarcity supply-and-demand technique used on elusive popular products like the McRib. So what exactly is going on here?
I reached out to the big wigs at Pringles HQ directly about this debacle, and a customer service representative explained it this way:
“This [product] was available for a limited time only. Special packs are very popular and sometimes stores run out of stock quickly.”
For now, I’ll guess I’ll just have to accept the fact that maybe me and everything bagel Pringles weren’t meant to meet.
Like Bigfoot, the loch ness monster and the boogeyman, people can claim that these chips exist all they want. However, I’ll only believe it when I see it.
