Ah yes. Your penny stock is a crock of ___. Your bank (and mine, if you’re unfortunately with WAMU) may tank tomorrow. The Eeekconomy™ needs a Lobotomy. So what’s a Cheaplander to do?

How about CHILLLL out. Yes, that’s right take a CHILLLLL pill.

OK, that was a new all time low for a product review introduction. What can I say - I’m too busy worrying about the bailout mess lately. But I did have a good time eating these new Tic Tac Chill Mints. It did take my mind off other more important things, if only for 5 minutes.

I’ve been a Tic Tac fan for many years. You wouldn’t believe how many years if I told you. I’m no Juno-come-lately Paulie Bleeker orange Tic Tac weenie (Disclaimer: I liked that movie. Alot). So it’s not too hard to get me to try their related products.

Although, I really wasn’t impressed with their new Tic Tac Bold release awhile back. Those mints just didn’t knock my socks off - and for having the name “BOLD” I was expecting it to pack a huge punch. They tasted like any other mint - might as well go eat some Altoids if you want something strong.

But I’ve taken a slight and dangerous fancy to their latest Chill mints. I keep popping them like there’s no tomorrow.

Anyhow, let’s start with the packaging which is a bit different. Namely, the box is larger as you can see above. That’s to accomodate the mints which look like giant flat Tic Tacs. The box even opens on the top with a hinge in similar fashion to a normal Tic Tac box. But there’s also an added “Sliding” panel on the front which also lets you offer someone a mint. I really liked that feature, it just seemed really cool. And I guess packaging is everything with mints.

I got both flavors - Exotic Cherry and Paradise Mint. Lovely marketing names, but you can just read them as “Artificial Cherry Flavor” and “Mint”.

These extra large Tic Tacs have that same smooth candy sugar coating shell on the outside that their smaller brethren do. This is interesting, and sort of nice - I’d thought they might have dispensed with the coating for the larger mints. I used to love to crunch up their fruit flavored Tic Tacs, like three at a time. Definitely made them more of a candy.

While you CAN crunch these larger ones up, it’s not as pleasurable as with the smaller ones. At least to me it isn’t. They tended to stay whole longer in my mouth.

The Exotic Cherry flavored variety has been my favorite. I like fruit flavored mints, and these had a slight tang to them that was nice. Not exactly candy, but not exactly mints. The Paradise Mint variety - I think of them more as “real” mints, the kind that are actually supposed to freshen your breath. Both fulfill different needs, I guess.

Ok, so I guess that brings me to my only peeve and that would be the Sugarfree aspect. I absolutely LOATHE the whole concept of sugar free things - aspartame, xylitol, splenda, whatever. It’s all yucky tasting and leaves a crappy feel in your mouth. I’m sure that everyone is going to disagree - but there you have it.

The thing is, so many people are on diets, can’t have sugar or have just been brainwashed to think sugar is evil. So there’s a ton of products out there that are sugarfree, and sometimes it’s just difficult to avoid. Mints are one of the casualties. I can only eat a few kinds of these sugarfree varieties. One was Icebreakers, but they actually did something to the formula very recently which boosted the aftertaste. So I have a hard time with those.

It was somewhat of a surprise that the new Chill mints didn’t bother me even though they’re sugar free. I was totally prepared to give them a negative review because I can’t stand the aftertaste. But the cherry ones had nearly none at all. The Paradise mints did have some aftertaste and after eating 4-5 of the Cherry variety in a row, there definitely was a slight aftertaste. But it definitely wasn’t as bad as some of the others I’ve had.

Oops. I haven’t talked about the most important thing - the price. Since I got these for review, I don’t know how much they cost. I assume it must be around $1-$2 because of the larger package and larger mints.

I’ve had a lot of thought on the whole mint packaging thing. How AWESOME would it be if you could get refills for mints at CostCo? Like a gigantic bag of Tic Tacs that you could just fill up your old boxes. Save the environment too, right? Sign me up.

But, of course, they’ll never do that because all the money’s in the packaging and presentation.