I guess I had one or something like it when I first moved out. My parents gave it to me along with a matching dining table, all of which had been sitting in their basement. My wife wasn’t a fan of it and when we moved out of the house we listed it for sale, eventually selling it for a few hundred dollars, after sitting on the market for close to 2 months and dropping the price a few times.

My parents were upset when they found out; it turned out they had had that table custom made earlier in their marriage when they could finally afford new furniture. They said they would’ve bought it back for more than we got had they known. But a couple days later they begrudgingly realized they didn’t have room for that furniture and it wouldn’t have made sense for them to buy it.

A few years later they moved into a smaller home since all of us kids had been grown and moved out for years. As they tried to sell furniture and other things they weren’t going to have room for, it became depressing to them to see how little these things were worth that they had spent a lot of money on new. They had a set of china for each of us kids, one they bought or received as a wedding gift, others they had inherited from dead relatives. But it became apparent that we all preferred the same set, the one with the simplest design, yet it also was clear that we would only rarely, if ever, use the china and it’s largely a waste of space for any of us.

I think we might even have our set already, but we never use it and it’s not on display. If we have it it’s in the bottom cabinets of a console my wife loves. Also there are a couple very nice crystal bowls my uncle bought us, that my wife is almost terrified to get out of their box out of fear of breaking them. We understand they’re all nice items and expensive, but we might’ve preferred to have that money spent on things we’d get more use out of.

Hershey is giving other candy/food manufacturers below-market deals on chocolate or above-market licensing deals to produce their chocolate candies in the USA so Americans don’t discover how much better chocolate tastes without butyric acid. Inexpensive foreign chocolate could destroy The Hershey Company and there are big companies like Nestlé or Mondelēz that could do it relatively easily but instead let Hershey’s produce their brands under license with butyric acid added.