The Wagon Wheel Effect

Many people are familiar with that feeling that sweets were so much bigger when we were kids. That, as the years have gone by, our favourite treat has gradually been whittled down to a mere sliver of the gigantic, big-as-your-head confections which once roamed the planet in our primordial youth.

The prime exemplar of this effect is the Wagon Wheel; a gigantic, round, marshmallow covered biscuit enclosed in a chocolatey covering that, in former times, required you to hold it steady in both hands whilst you spent days nibbling at its outer edges. Consuming the whole thing could take weeks or even months. These days you could probably dunk one in your coffee without touching the edge of the cup; the Wagon Wheel’s content having been systematically reduced year on year, by confectioners anxious to reduce production costs whilst increasing the amount of pocket money that they take out of the hands of small children.

However, rather than airily waving aside the protestations of weasel-faced manufacturers that this scenario just isn’t true, I believe it is time to take them at their word and remedy this whole Wagon Wheel Effect issue.

I therefore propose a line of confectionary to be produced in, say, 25 different sizes (after that, people seem to just get wider rather than taller), with each size to be limited to persons of a specific age. So, a size 1 wagon wheel could only be sold to a 1 year old, a size 2 to a two year old and so on. The largest size being sold to 25 year olds and up. The difference in size would be equal to the average proportionate change in size between each age group.

One problem I can foresee with this excellent scheme, is that it might create the Wagon Wheel effect in an even more irritating way. A child starting out with a smaller size sweet might anxiously look forward to growing up in order that they can buy one of those gigantic Wagon Wheels, eight times the size of your head, that the adults have, only to find that when they reach the appropriate age, the sweet doesn’t seem to be any larger than the ones that they bought in their youth. In order to mitigate against this problem, the sweets will need to be sold on a behind-the-counter basis, so that they are not visible to customers.