Most women will tell you they like it thicker and wider.

Which is exactly why I prefer the king size Snickers candy bar over the regular size bar. It's thicker and wider. It feels better in your hand, and it feels better when you put it in your mouth.

Right ladies?

Right after lunch today I ran into my favorite Wawa convenience store.

And there it was ... just what I was looking for ... the candy display ... the rack containing my quest ... the rack containing the king size Snickers candy bar.

I grabbed one, went to register, and payed. I went outside, got into my mini-van, and ripped open the wrapper, but ... but WTF? This wasn't a king size Snickers bar, It was two small Snickers bars laid end to end to give the appearance of being a king size bar.

It wasn't thicker, wasn't wider.

WTF's going on here

I have a confession to make. I've enjoyed the Snickers bar since I was a kid. That was during the 1940s, when I started grade school and, believe it or not, when most candy bars cost a nickel. But somewhere in the 60-plus years between then and now, I fell in love with the Snickers bar, and eventually the king size Snickers.

I can document my first realization that Snickers was my favorite candy bar - over its cousin the Milky Way, the Hershey with almonds, the Resse's peanut butter cup, and the Almond Joy. The realization occurred during a Thanksgiving vacation to the island of St. Croix in 1985. I went with my girlfriend and another couple.

I had the time off because I'd been fired from my job three months earlier, a very lucrative job with Holiday Spa, managing their location in Cherry Hill, New Jersey

So I didn't need to beg for permission to get some time off from work. This trip had been scheduled for a year earlier, but at the last minute we were told that two managers in the same district couldn't take vacations at the same time - but that's another story for another day.

My realization that Snickers was my favorite candy bar happened at the airport in San Juan.

There were no direct flights from Philly to St. Croix in those days, so we were forced to take a convoluted route getting there. First a stop in Baltimore, where we changed planes, then another in Tampa, where we experienced a delay for an electrical equipment repair, and then off to Miami - where we'd already missed the connecting flight for the next leg of our journey - San Juan. The delay, of course, meant we were going to also miss our connecting flight form San Juan to St. Croix, which was our final destination. That is, if we ever got to San Juan.

I don't remember being bothered by any of this. If we got there that day or the next day, it didn't matter to me. Since I was now unemployed, I had nothing else to do and we'd rented a luxury villa near the East End of St. Croix for eight days. If we missed the last flight to St. Croix, American Airlines would have to put us up in a hotel in San Juan and arrange ticketing for the first available flight the next morning. My girlfriend and I had recently seen Romancing the Stone.

We loved Romancing the Stone and actually fantacized about this adventure turning into one like Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner had in Cartagena, Colombia.

Back then, the San Juan airport was a throw-back back to simpler times. No jet-ways to load or unload passengers. You stepped out of the plane, descended one of those rolling stairways, and walked across the tarmac to the terminal.

The instant I stepped out of the plane, I began falling in love with San Juan, falling in love with the tropics.

Winter was approaching back home, and the temperatures in Philly were already dropping down close to freezing. And, suddenly, here I was in San Juan, stepping into a blast of warm air that told me I was in a new world, a world of mystery and adventure.

The terminal was pretty much open air in those days, no air-conditioning. You could hear boom-boxes outside pounding out loud Latin rhythms, there were colorful dancers stepping and twirling, and there were chickens, yes, goddamn live chickens running around squawking as they chased down kernels of popcorn being tossed in their direction and fought off the other chickens to get something to eat. I was already in love with the place.

We had an hour to kill before our flight to St. Croix took off.

I spotted a vending machine nearby, a candy machine. I walked over, examined the selections, and the Snickers bar just jumped out at me. I inserted the proper coinage into the slot and pulled the plunger.

Now, some people like to freeze their candy bars. But I'm not one of those people, don't understand that concept at all. That’s because I prefer my chocolate slightly on the melting side. Back home, I put candy bars in my pockets to get them to the proper temperature to be truly enjoyed.

I unwrapped the Snickers bar and, guess what? It was slightly melting, already, exactly the way I liked it, without having to put it in my pocket. Because of that time, that place, and that experience, Snickers went to the top of my list of candy bars, and has remained there ever since.

Just so I don't leave too many loose ends here. We had a great time and fell in love with St. Croix. So much so that our traveling companies decided to forfeit their return tickets and stay there. We decided to move there as well. We rented two apartments at Bay Garden, halfway up a hillside, overlooking Christiansted harbor, with a view of St. Thomas and some down-islands on the horizon.

 But the girlfriend and I couldn't just stay. We had loose ends to tie back home.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, whatever the case may be, the girlfriend and I went through one of our dozen or so break-ups when we returned to Philly. But I tied all the loose ends together and moved to St. Croix about a month later. My 20-year-old daughter took the girlfriend’s place.

But my first residence in St. Croix lasted for less than a month. Seeing the error in their ways, executives with my old company made a few phone to the pay phone at Bay Garden calls and rehired me. But not before I insisted on a compensation package I couldn’t refuse – and I got it in writing.

Since the apartment in St. Croix was paid for, my daughter decided to stay, and she wound up having an adventure right out of Romancing the Stone - but that's a story for another time..

But being summarily fired, as I had been, soured me on working for my company any longer than necessary. I decided to become a writer and also decided to return to St. Croix as soon as I put my financial affairs in good shape. Which took two years.

At that time my son and I moved to the island, where I got a job teaching algebra, geometry, and trigonometry at the Country Day School, a premier, expensive private school. I eventually finagled a sports-writing job with the local newspaper, and ultimately became a published writer when I sold my first article to a major magazine - Cavalier, a now-defunct men's magazine.

Below are the tear-sheets from that story. I used the pseudonym Steven Barry in case the parents of any of my students came across the article, i didn't want to get fired for some sort of morals violation.

I lived in St. Croix for four years. My son and I have since returned to the mainland, but my daughter and granddaughter remain on the island to this day where they enjoy their own little piece of paradise.

Anyway, getting back to the point, that's when, where, and why I fell in love with the Snickers bar - at the airport in San Juan on the way to my first visit to St. Croix.

Mars Inc. makes the Snickers, along with several other popular candies - Mars Bar, Milky Way, M & M's, Twix, and Skittles. Mars is an international conglomerate with other food interests as well - Uncle Ben's, Whiskas, ad Pedigree, to name just three.

For detailed information about the company, its history, and its products, I'm including a link to the Mars website.

 Mars is a very successful company. They advertise everywhere, including the Supwer Bowl, which is the most expensive source of advertising in the history of the world.

From time to time, however, their ad agency produces a commercial that meets with controversy in the marketplace. A few samples of the controversial TV ads follow ...

What happened to the king size Snickers?

I immediately thought it was all dollars and cents - and perhaps it is. You know, like shit-canning the machines that process the king size bars because they were more expensive to operate than smaller machines.

Now the king size bar still says "king size" on the label.

But once you remove the wrapper, you find two small Snickers bars - smaller than the regular bar - laid end to end.

This is unnaceptable to me - no longer thicker, no longer wider.

In fact, each "king size" bar is smaller than the regular. See photo below. 

According to Wikipedia, the king size Snickers bar started to get phased out in 2004 in the United Kingdom when the Food and Drink Administration encouraged the food industry to become more health conscious in regard to reducing portion sizes.

The company propaganda says that the two bars make the Snickers shareable - "Our king-size bars that come in one portion will be changed so they are shareable or can be consumed on more than one occasion. The name king-size will be phased out."

This change resultes in a reduced weight from 3.7 oz. to 3.29 oz.

No wonder I've been losing so much weight lately.

Nonsense.  

 I've purchased my last Snickers bar.

The love affair is over.