The Bush Years were a strange time.īut I digress. I can also tell you I was wearing a throwback 1986 New York Mets jersey for the majority of this adventure, and I had about a solid pound of styling glue in my hair. A plant was purchased, shitty Chinese food was inhaled, locals were teased in a manner I considered playful but they probably construed as threatening. I remember driving to Plains, Georgia (the hometown of Jimmy Carter) the next day, but I don’t remember why. Thankfully, Coke didn’t bungle the Surge/Vault recipe, and I felt the most refreshing euphoria of the decade on my taste buds. If this tastes like shit, I’ll just have wasted nine hours of my life. As I brought that inaugural Vault to my lips, my heart became engulfed in fear. I remember my shrewd decision to buy a Vault from the Coke vending machine just outside the supermarket-which was nestled between some of the most picturesque mountains I’d ever seen-before rushing in and snapping up $50 worth of twelve packs. Fatigue was arresting my body, but just twenty minutes north of that hotel there allegedly sat a supermarket stocked to the gills with Surge 2.0. I arrived at my hotel streaked from head to toe in the thickest sweat imaginable. It was blisteringly hot, and for reasons I can’t recall I drove most of the way with the air conditioning off. When I learned of Vault and where was being test-marketed in June of 2005, I drove nine hours non-stop from Florida to the middle of Alabama just so I could get a jump on the rest of humanity. I devoted a large chunk of my time in the early 2000s to researching its demise and keeping tabs on rumors of its resurrection. The inexplicable introduction of camouflage-patterned cans later in Vault’s run did little to help secure mainstream acceptance.Īnyone who knows me knows I was a bonafide Surge junkie during that sickeningly sweet pop’s heyday. A massive commercial push like the one Coca-Cola threw behind Surge when that beverage was first rolled out in 1996 never materialized for Vault, and the drink languished in the shadowy city limits of the carbonated beverage empire for the majority of it existence. Vault was quickly embraced by legions of mourning Surge fans, but the soda had trouble finding footing outside that contingent. The formula was more or less the same for both drinks save one major exception: Vault contained roughly twenty more milligrams of caffeine, making it far more “extreme” than Surge, Mountain Dew, and most other youth-oriented pops competing for market share. Introduced as the beverage that drank like a soda but “kicked” like an energy drink, Vault was created to quell the sizable consumer element upset over Coca-Cola’s quiet 2002 dumping of “extreme” citrus drink Surge (though the company would never publicly cop to this fact). Coca-Cola confirmed via Twitter today that Vault is now meeting the same fate as Surge-a victim, apparently, of low demand and similarly low sales (or so said the Coca-Cola customer service rep I spoke with just moments ago via 1-800-GET-COKE). It'll be exciting to wait and see which sweet and spooky offerings Wawa will create the next time that Halloween rolls around.Vault, the citrus “hybrid energy soda” Coca-Cola launched in 2005 to satiate fans of the company’s discontinued late ’90s soft drink Surge, has died at the tender age of six. Like other secret menu items, you had to click the goose on Wawa's ordering screens to find these treats. In 2019, Wawa featured three more limted-edition Halloween secret menu smoothies: Spellbinding Strawberry, Mystical Mango, and Blueberry Pom Reader, with a delicious and healthy blend of blueberry and pomegranate (via NBC Philadelphia). And of course, there was the Franken-Mint Macchiato,which was a blend of espresso and mint topped with cookie pieces and whipped cream. It also offered the Fang-O Mango, a mango smoothie with chocolate sauce and a swirl of blood-red strawberry sauce that gave it a ghoulish spin. Wawa frequently sells themed beverages for Halloween to celebrate the festivities. In 2018, Wawa's secret menu offered several spooky, and downright creative, Halloween-themed smoothies, including the Graveyard Smash, a play on the classic "worms in dirt" treat, which featured vanilla ice cream whipped with cookie pieces, and topped with crumbled cookie "dirt" and gummy worms (via Philly Voice).
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