My grocery shelves have been changing—and not for the better.

Pretty much since I can remember, I’ve always lived close to and shopped in a No Frills grocery store. In terms of discount supermarkets in Ontario, they were usually the cleanest and best stocked. And best of all, they have two house brands: President’s Choice and No Name. So, in one store, I could buy dirt cheap tuna fish but still lay my hands on those addictive chocolate chunk cookies that I like.

[caption id="attachment_276" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="When Pepsi\'s not on sale."][/caption]Now not every product was a winner. For some reason house brands can’t always measure up to name brands. And well, PC Cola was one of them. If I can describe it, I’d have to says it tastes like they were trying to go for somewhere around Coke, but decided to give up three-quarters of the way. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t my first choice.

But now it looks like whole company is in the middle of rebranding and soft drinks are going through the largest changes. The first half of their decision was to shift the drinks over to the No Name brand for some reason I can’t fathom. But what’s even worse is the “new” packaging. Take a look:

One of the problems of living in a suburb, like I do, is you’re always reminded that your city is always looked upon as being inferior to the metropolis that borders it. While out here, in the hinterlands of the Greater Toronto Area we call Mississauga, we may not have an inferiority complex, we do have a lack of architectural personality.

For the longest time, Mississauga had been all about sprawl. Look at any point on a map and you can see we’re less a city than a collection of subdivisions and shopping plazas. I think we have more space devoted to parking lots than roads…but I’m getting off topic. Sprawl. As recently as 1995, our city had many tracts of old farmland, so it was nothing for our city council to rezone it for residential and build a few hundred detached homes, add a grocery store somewhere in there, and move on. No condo skyrises, no commercial towers, just backyards and No Exit signs. I think once the city’s population zoomed past 600,000 they realized their plans were no longer sustainable.