The Declining Quality of Hershey's and Google Maps

Hershey's and Google Maps are completely unrelated, but just like the Butterfinger, some products or services are not as good as they used to be. I'll start with Hershey's.

Some of us may remember how good the Hershey's Cookies and Creme and Hugs chocolates had excellent white chocolate. A few years ago I noticed that their Cookies and Creme chocolates barely tasted OK. Have my taste buds changed? Am I a pickier eater now? That's what I thought.

Just over a year ago, when I had my first large family reunion after a three-year COVID hiatus, I offered Hershey's Hugs for a Christmas family reunion (as I've done for a while) and noticed a different taste. I checked the ingredients and the label and noticed that milk chocolate was now hugged in white creme instead of white chocolate. That white creme is made with vegetable oils such as palm oil. While the picture that is shown below shows Cookies and Creme chocolate, the ingredients of Hugs' white creme are either the same or very similar to what is shown here:

When I visited Toronto last year, I saw what appeared to be the same Hershey's Cookies and Creme as the ones found in the US, but I noticed that the main fat ingredient was cocoa butter instead of other vegetable oils as they have in the US and Mexico: 

I decided to try them and they seemed to taste just like they did when I was younger. 

This company used to sell their white chocolate using trans fats in Mexico. While these are still allowed in Mexico, they now need to be labeled as such, so that people can actually easily see that. Fortunately, Hershey's Mexico no longer adds trans fats to their products. 

I've visited Hershey, PA, and after learning about the The M.S. Hershey Foundation in one of their tours, I've had great opinions about their foundation. But despite this, I don't believe Milton Hershey would've been satisfied with using cheaper lower quality ingredients.

Now I'll talk about Google Maps. I paid for my first intercontinental trip in 2016. In order to plan for this trip, I started asking friends and family members for tips. While I would've done a much better job in planning the same trip now, it was still worth it:

About two years later I accidentally discovered Lonely Planet travel guides in a Barnes & Noble's bookstore. This was perhaps because I did not know anyone who had been to Russia that I would trust to help me plan a trip over there in 2018.

I don't remember how this happened, but I also accidentally discovered that Google Maps and Google would show you all top attractions in a city by simply typing something such as: "things to do in Cincinnati." This made it really easy to check pictures of a place. If it felt like it was worth it, you could just click "save" and the place was saved on your maps. As many places show their opening hours, it was also easy to set up an itinerary, even with some places that are not shown in the Lonely Planet guides. This makes it easy to find hidden treasures, especially those that are not on the average tourist's radar such as these ones:

Now it's not that simple. You can still search for things to do in any particular city, but the number of results that are shown is now limited. You now need to look for certain things separately. I now have to search for palaces, museums, and churches separately. Some of these places will not show up by simply searching for things to do, and some others are not top-notch attractions. This process now takes longer, and I might miss some nice squares, parks, streets, or neighborhoods. 

While I must say that Google Fi has made it easy to use US data abroad without any roaming charges, I completely rely on their parent company's maps for directions. 

Google Maps looks great on my computer:

But not on my phone. Old places that were saved when I was simply looking for things to do in different cities are not always visible on my phone. Only the yellow icons (known as starred places) are automatically shown on my phone. I now have to look for blue and green icons (known as travel plans and want to go respectively). Only one kind of colored icon is shown at the same time:

This is not just more complicated because of the extra clicks, it is no longer feasible to label higher priority places in one color, or places that open on Mondays (when a lot of places are closed) in a different color.

Just like the Costco item that disappears without warning, so did the original Butterfinger, the chewy flavored life savers with a juicy center, and the ease of using some Google Maps features. And just as some Costco items sometimes come back, maybe some cool features will return to Google and Google Maps. Maybe some good old flavors will return. Only time will tell.