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One day more than 60 years ago I came home from the store with a pound of margarine that simply amazed my mother. To understand why, you need to know that in those days dairymen had enough political clout to get a law passed that prohibited margarine manufacturers from giving their naturally white product the artificial yellow color that made it look like butter. Since most people back then didn't care to spread what appeared to be lard on their bread, the margarine makers included in each package a separate packet of yellow vegetable dye that the consumer could stir into the white margarine.

But the margarine I brought home that memorable day had a pellet of coloring inside the plastic bag of margarine. The slightest squeeze broke the pellet. Then a few seconds of massaging the package turned the margarine into a lovely, uniform yellow. No more dumping the margarine and the dye into a bowl and tediously mashing it to obtain the acceptable butter color.

My wife doesn't remember as much as I do about white margarine and other products that have disappeared from store shelves. That's because she's younger than I am.

These days she buys a kitchen cleanser called Comet which she has learned to hand me when I ask for Bab-O, the cleanser we used when I was a kid. I haven't seen it for years so I plugged Bab-O into the Internet the other day to see if it's still on the market. The results were unclear. Several websites offered Bab-O but I couldn't tell if their Bab-O was recently manufactured or if it is simply left over from the old days. I saw one reference that led me to believe that Bab-O is currently being made by some outfit in Chicago. Does anybody know for sure what happened to this product? It's probably not as good as later cleansers like Comet but I still prefer the name Bab-O.

Speaking of the old days, we still use the term “soap opera” in reference to real-life situations that are long on drama but short on substance. Family squabbles in particular tend to fit well into the soap opera genre. But most people today don't know what the original soap operas were. In the 1930s and '40s they were 15-minute daytime radio programs aimed at injecting some excitement into the humdrum lives of so many stay-at-home moms of that period. They were mostly sponsored by companies that sold Chipso, Rinso, Dreft and other laundry products that have faded into the past.

When I was in school I delivered handbills door to door. I still remember hearing soap opera dialogue, consisting heavily of whining and moaning, coming from every house I passed. I still can't believe how much laundry soap those dramatized nervous breakdowns could sell.

I think the reason why a lot of good old product names have been junked along the way is because we didn't used to have so much market research. Now we have focus groups, subliminal research and all kinds of other snoopy ways to test consumer reaction to various product names. Also, a new name provides manufacturers with an excuse to advertise the most dynamic word in merchandising, which is “new.” 

Not long ago I bought a so-called new version of my favorite coffee. I finally concluded that the only thing new about it was that you got less coffee in the new can but you paid the same old price.