Ahh the pretzel stick. A delicacy for 5-year-olds with the finest taste. A lunchbox snack that your friends would always ask for a share of. A crispy, salted delight in stick form; it’s genius. Well, if you were looking for another reason to hate capitalism, this is it. The beloved pretzel stick is gone, stripped away from the shelves and from deep within our hearts – not just from Dunedin, but across Aotearoa.
The stick pretzels' disappearance has been suppressed by major supermarkets and seemingly gone unnoticed by the public eye. Sure, the highly inferior pretzel twist is still available in stores, but Critic Te Ārohi would not be a bystander in this unnoticed tragedy. Enter prime investigative journalism, to what we’re calling The Great Pretzel Conspiracy. And yes, we’re super salty about it.
Critic first came across this story when a staff member shared their experience with the recent Gingerbread Housing Crisis. Armed with questionable engineering knowledge and a sweet tooth, one of Critic’s loyal staff set out to create one of the greatest gingerbread houses of our time. But the house was missing one key aspect: the fence. No other crispened bread could compare to the “highly practical qualities” of the pretzel stick, and our staff searched high and low, behind bread bags and shelves – to no avail. Oh, woe, the “naturally scrumptious” stick and “nostalgic flavours of an iconic childhood snack” would not be making it to this gingerbread neighbourhood. The Christmas Pinterest board would never be fulfilled, and many gingerbread people were pinned under the crisis. With no media coverage, innocent gingerbread lives were snuffed out of the public sphere.
There are two key stick pretzel producers in this cold case: Woolworths and Shultz. We flipped a coin and started with Woolies, placing them at the centre of our crime-style pinboard. After being put on hold several times by customer service, they provided the number of a stock manager – but the number provided didn’t exist. With our questions being met with dial tone, Critic was blue-balled, duped and pretzel-less. We usually like to be wined and dined before we’re fucked, but nevermind that. What do Woolies have to hide? What really happened to the pretzel sticks?
We had no choice. It was time to bring in Olive: the 24/7 AI chatbot from the Woolworths’ website. Despite what “Artificial Intelligence” would imply, Olive couldn’t handle the complexity of pretzel stick stock (“Sorry – I don’t understand your request!”). It wasn’t long before Critic got a new customer service employee – Sonika. “The pretzel sticks were deleted by the supplier,” a fuming Critic was told. “But we still have WW Pretzel Twists 200g”. They say that as if twists and sticks taste the same. Amateurs.
We turned to Shultz. As a dedicated pretzel brand, we had a healthy respect for Shultz and were looking forward to speaking to someone with an intimate knowledge of the industry. Tanya informed Critic that supermarket chains “deleted the Shultz Pretzel Sticks over three years ago”. The fuck? Apparently our country doesn’t have the population to support the stick variety of pretzels (do better, Aotearoa). As such, supermarket chains won’t give up their shelf space “real estate” unless it makes them money. Corporate greed wins once again.
It was time to do what Critic knows best: asking students about what they think about irrelevant and niche topics while they try to study. Just as we suspected, not one person knew about the mysterious pretzel disappearance. “This is news to me,” Juliette told us. “I used to love those!” So did we, Juliette. So did we. “Really sad,” concurred her friend Ella, admirably clocking the gravity of the situation. However, some cared far less about the subject. Trinity said she’s “not too disappointed” over the loss, but she does “prefer the sticks over the bows”. Clearly a victim of Big Pretzel’s brainwashing, Hannah reckoned that the “sticks are just sticks” while “the bows are interesting”.
No one had any idea why they were taken away. We haven’t yet addressed the inconsistency here: key pretzel players were contradicting themselves in circles, with Woolies claiming the supplier deleted the stock, while Shultz pointed the finger at supermarkets. Meanwhile, stick pretzel lovers have been caught in the middle (not Hannah, apparently). Left with more questions than answers, Critic staff’s hands have inched closer towards the leftover tinfoil from Chilli Dhaba naan bread. Mutters of “Big Pretzel” have been heard echoing down the hallway of OUSA. There’s a trail from office doors of soggy twisted pretzels in vain homemade attempts to stickify them.