Gibson snapped this photo at an Oregon Quality Food Center that seems to indicate the aisle stocker did some time at frat parties. He wishes he’d noticed the display before he went out of his way to buy ping pong balls.
He writes:
Strategic product placement…. this is from my suburban Portland QFC (Kroger) – ironically, when shopping for Beer Pong balls last month I went all the way to Target because it didn’t occur to me to look in the beer aisle at the grocery store.
Beer pong players, where do you stock up on the equipment for your athletic endeavors?
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Mel Gibson?
Clearly not, or there would be attatched audio of him ranting about whores and rose gardens.
Ha, I suppose my tip could have been more specific – I am a 30+ year old married chick who prefers Beer Die over Beer Pong any day….. but I was playing recently to relive some college glory days.
This is pretty standard procedure in most grocery chains now.
Yep. Although when I was in college the little liquor store by campus took it a step further and started selling individual ping pong balls for a buck each. Pricey, but when you need beer pong balls at four in the morning, and there was nowhere else selling them, it seemed fair.
I’ve had to have seen this for 5 years now at various grocery store liquor isles and at liquor stores. Makes sense to put things that people commonly buy together.
I don’t see cups. You mean I still have to go to another aisle?
Lame.
I highly doubt those are competition certified balls. You would need to special order from an internet supplier to ensure that you receive the highest quality balls to plop into your cups. Cheap Chinese knockoffs are made of old drywall, and will release sulphur compounds into your tasty beer.
Since when have the kind of people that play beer pong, even owned ‘tasty beer’. Usually it’s some cheap american mass-market pseudo-beer, like budweiser.
very few people in this world are as annoying as the beer snob. worse than foodies. worse than hipsters.
On par with wine snobs though. Actually, the wine snobs are worse. “Oh, that bottle only cost $30, I only drink wine reviewed by Wine Snob quarterly, and my CHEAPEST bottle starts at $50.”
Perhaps I should have put quotation marks around Tasty Beer. The beer snobs could have left it alone.
Typically wine snobs can’t tell the difference between the $70 bottle, and the $20 bottle, often preferring the cheaper one. beer snobs are the worst though, if i’m planning on drinking outside on a hot day, or being out at the bars for any significant amount of time, the last thing i want is a heavy beer or their smug faces
+1
So I’m trying to figure out if you either (1) have never played beer pong because you don’t use craft beer, or (2) if you use craft beer for beer pong.
After that I’m gonna figure out which one of those is dumber.
Budweiser? That was always too expensive for serious beer pongers. Try “Natural Light” or “Bud Ice” as the beer of choice. And call me a beer snob, but those are terrible tasting beers!
Mmmmm…. Milwaukee’s Best…. aka… the BEAST! Still my swill of choice when not drinking something with actual taste.
maybe for undergrads, at gradstudent level competition we used craft microbrews and had single malt scotch in the wash cups
Bud Light for getting drunk, Shiner Bock, Blue Moon, Yuengling, random IPAs at craft breweries for enjoying a couple tasty brews.
There’s no sense being a beer snob (“I NEVER drink XYZ!”), you just have to choose the right beer for the right application!
I live in PA… i have two trips, Target and Beer distributor
Not anymore. My local beer distributor had a beer pong kit next to the register. 20 cups, 10 red & 10 blue and 2 pong balls.
Should be 12 cups. They forgot to include the wash cups. noobs
I noticed a Wal-Mart in my area doing something similar, they stock the KY Jelly right next to the bank.
+1
that’s hilarious!
Kudos, I needed the laugh
this post is full of win.
I’ve seen that at my local Kroger too. Nice product placement.
At my jewel the have actual beer pong kits. It comes with cups and balls the only thing missing is the beer.
I got one of those from Spencers…I liked it cuz it came with plastic racks for the balls, which is great for when we want to play on the boat….the ups don’t tip over when waves come through!
Sports Authority and other places stock the kits too. They call it party pong lol!
I was more surprised (amazed?) by this when I saw it: http://www.hasbro.com/games/en_US/cuponk/
*shrugs* Start’em young, I guess….great for hand/eye coordination!!
That is hilarious I’ve never seen them before!
Yeah I saw a commercial for this and wondered why kids were playing beer pong. It was a 1800 number product none the less.
>Beer pong players, where do you stock up on the equipment for your athletic endeavors?
Cartoon Network. They had one of those call-and-order spots featuring tweens bouncing ping-pong balls into blue soda cups. Trick shots down the hallway and everything. Definitely a “wait, what?” moment in parenting life.
I have seen all kinds of Beer Pong kits popping up in convenience stores lately. I was in Reno a couple of months ago and saw the setup for the “Beer Pong World Championships”.
Thanks for visiting! Hope you left some money at one of our casinos!
On a somewhat-on-topic note, there’s an Ace Hardware here in town located next to a high school. I took a friend there to get some items to build a beer bong. He found a funnel, but he needed some tubing cut by one of the store employees. The employee saw the funnel and asked us if we were making a beer bong. We answered “Yes”, and next thing you know she’s taking us up and down the aisles, grabbing all the exact parts we needed to build a beer bong. Something told me that she had done this a few dozen times before…
Nothing will beat, for me, the Sheetz near my college selling “Tabletop game” kits, which included 20 plastic cups and 3 ping pong balls
In Massachusetts, I can buy neither beer nor ping pong balls in my local supermarket. FML.
I can! Hannifords and Stop and Shop FTW.
“i am champion at beer pong allen iverson hakeem olajuwon”
Probably the best header for a post I’ve ever seen.
although the inclusion of Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon is slightly mysterious, given that he’s a devout Muslim and doesn’t drink.
Iverson on the other hand. Well…
It’s a quote from a song: http://edit.mp3lyrics.org/a/asher-roth/i-love-college/
ah, I get it now. Sort of.
Me so behind the times
thx for explanation
The Joe Canal’s liquor warehouse near me in NJ has ping pong balls near the cases of warm beer too.
Warm beer is a crime.
Ebay, 100-200 at a time.
Wow. For once, instead of being annoyed at some of Kansas’s stupid liquor laws, i am glad that liquor stores here can *only* sell liquor- no mixers, no cigarettes, and definitely no ping pong balls.
I’ll be 29 tomorrow… and I’ve never played beer pong in my life.
Put it on your list.
I honestly don’t know how to play – I saw it once and kept seeing the ball hit the floor… I think I dry heaved when the dude used it again – “splash cup” or no… that’s just disgusting.
Haha, well it is definitely not the cleanest game. If you worry about germs and dirt in your beer, than yeah, you probably wouldn’t enjoy it.
Alcohol will kill germs but it won’t get rid of “particles and debris.” *gag*
There are two methods for dealing with the ball hitting the floor
1 Rinse it in a cup of water specifically for that purpose (for what good it will do)
2 Use cups of water instead of cups of beer for playing so that when someone makes the ball into your cup, you remove that cup of water, but drink clean beer from another cup waiting on the side of the table.
This is new? Pretty standard here in NY. At Wegmans and all grocery stores.
Pizza joints and beer stores in my old college town have gone a step further. They sell ping pong balls with their business stamped on them right next to the register.
Quarters is a superior game, both in unusual skill required (bouncing quarters, as opposed to everyone-knows-how ping pong balls) and marks on the table as proof of proficiency.
+1
In terms of a party game, I disagree, since the beer pong table can be quickly converted to boat races (flip cup) to involve more people.
I also suck at quarters.
The Publix in Tally does this too. The solo cups, ping pong balls and beer are all next to each other. The Jell-O shot cups can be found close by.
Pizza joints and beer stores in my old college town have gone a step further. They sell ping pong balls with their business stamped on them right next to the register.
A few of the stores that I shop at have done this. One actually had glass mugs and ping pong balls right next to each other.
When I worked at Foodtown, I kept trying to convince our non-foods guy that due to our proximity to Seaside Park, NJ, and the fact we were open 24/7, we should buy ping pong balls for people playing beer pong. He refused to believe me that people would come in at 1-2am looking for ping pong balls. I said he could charge $2.00 a pack, and they would sell, but he never listened.
I still don’t understand why frat boys need ways to get drunk faster. I also don’t understand why any college campus allows fraternities and sororities of any kind.
The frat boys need a way to encourage the sorority girls to get drunk faster!
Because Real Life Fraternities =/= TV and Movie Fraternities
Using Rogue for beer pong? BLASPHEMY!
My friend decided that for her graduation party last year she wanted beer pong. Neither of us had ever played, nor bought the accessories for beer pong. We were still pondering where we would have to go to get ping pong balls when we turned into the beer aisle at the supermarket. And there, right above the PBR, it was…
Pong balls.
I thought it was genious then, and I still do.
The Walgreens by me actually keep the ping pong balls behind the counter, next to the tabacco. No sure if they think its a “naughty product” or if that just meant young kids were shoplifting them a lot.
I’m looking at the pic and I don’t see any “crap” beers there. I see Rogue Shakespeare Stout. By “crap” beer I mean keystone, bud, etc. Who plays beer pong with “good” beer?
If that QFC is like the other Kroger stores, including Fred Meyer, the beer aisle goes – micro and import bombers, micro and import 6 and 12-packs, domestic beer, cheap domestic beer (Hamm’s, PBR, Busch, Natural Light), non-alcoholic beer.
The balls are likely to attract people going into the beer aisle, where they’ll see the micros (like Rogue) first.
Now you can buy Beer Pong Kits, they have them at liquor stores and even at some sporting goods stores. They were seriously a plastic bag with red plastic Solo brand cups and ping pong balls.
This is about the only 5 second rule I won’t overlook-drinking beer that has had a ping pong ball that has fallen to the floor of a disgusting garage floor over and over in it….the response I get from people when I point that out? “We rinse it off every time!” (Yep, in the same cup of water with grass clippings and roach droppings floating in it from all the other rinses) And I hate cheap beer.
I noticed ping pong balls in the beer aisle at the grocery store and it mystified me. This thread still doesn’t clear anything up for me. I still can’t fathom the connection between beer and ping pong, although now at least I know that it has something to do with frat boys.
Wikipedia is your friend! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Pong
I recently spotted “mini cups” next to the jello in my Stop & Shop.
I wonder which QFC this is at…. I get all my beer from the one up the block from me as they have the cheapest beer in town.
My local Trig’s in central wisconsin also has ping pong balls right outside the liquor department.