In June, sprinkled amongst the usual corporate skulduggery and customer service n’er-do-wells, a few feature articles plopped on The Consumerist pie like plump cherries. The hark and harrumph of The Royal We was joined
by two talented, outside voices, Tim Nudd, better known as editor of Adfreak and Kate Bingaman, better known for making drawings of her receipts and credit card statements.

• Kate’s “Dirt Cheap in Mississippi” is a love note to the regional discount store. Amongst the detritus of consumer goods at substantial markdowns, she discovered odd thrift, useful miscellany, and inspiration. The piece is chock full of her great photos, too.

• In “The Secret World of Packaged Goods Hotlines,” Tim called up the consumer hotlines inscribed on the backs of shrink-wrapped foodstuffs. How addictive is Pounce? Why haven’t the Skippy people ever heard of a Fluffernutter? Some questions are better left unanswered.

• Speaking of Fluffernutter… Even I – a chain-smoking, switchblade slinging J.D. punk – didn’t really believe the fabric of my mother’s sanity to be so thinly stretched across the gluttonous belly of mass consumerism. — “In Which My Mother Consumes Five Gallons of Marshmallow Fluff,” a Brownlee original.

• Vincent Ferrari spoke on-camera with us, post media blitz, about how it all went down, his real thoughts about AOL’s apology, and how AOL ain’t seen nothing’ yet, in the imaginatively titled, “We Interview Vincent Ferrari, AOL Canceller“

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