Soft drinks in restaurants tasting like postage stamps

[bandit957]

Ever get a soft drink at a restaurant that tasted like a postage stamp?

I've heard this problem has expanded to iced tea lately too.

Once in a while, you'll get a soft drink at a restaurant that tastes minty, which it shouldn't.

[kphoger]

No, but my wife once got a milkshake at Spangles that tasted like soap.  We haven't been back to that Spangles ever since.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Sometimes you can tell as soon as it comes out of the fountain that the pop is bad, and you can try another pop brand as a backup. Other times, you get the nasty surprise of drinking colored carbonated water that looks normal in every way until you try to drink it.

[Max Rockatansky]

Can't say I've had a postage stamp flavored shake.

[rickmastfan67]

Ever get a soft drink at a restaurant that tasted like a postage stamp?

Are you sure your taste buds aren't fried?

I know locally that I've had no issues at the places I frequent, sans the occasional flavor just running out (thus I swap to something different).

[Dirt Roads]

Ever get a soft drink at a restaurant that tasted like a postage stamp?

No, but diet sodas that have Aspartame sweetener tend to have a relative short [expiration] date and will become bitter in the soda line.  In the grocery stores, diet sodas are stamped with a "Best Before" date.  I'm assuming that the same is now true in the commercial soda supply side, but there weren't any dates on soda canisters back when I worked for a pizza place back in the early 1980s.  There's been a rumor going around for decades about one of the chemicals that Aspartame breaks down into, but I've yet to see substantive evidence of that happening in the bottle (unless a diet soda is exposed to very high temperatures).  Being from West Virginia, I am prone to being able to detect such substances from a long distance away.   

[webny99]

What do postage stamps taste like?

[Rothman]

Yep, diet sodas taste like chemicals that you aren't supposed to drink to me.

[kphoger]

What do postage stamps taste like?

Have you seriously never licked a stamp?

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[JayhawkCO]

It's fun that when I see a particular new topic posted, I don't even have to guess who started it.

[webny99]

What do postage stamps taste like?

Have you seriously never licked a stamp?

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Uh... no. I've used saliva to seal an envelope a few times, but the only kind of stamps I'm familiar with are self-adhesive.

[kphoger]

Well, that boils down to our age difference, then.

Yet one wouldn't want to guess about a matter this important, so I got in touch with the United States Postal Service in Washington, where the postal official who knows the most about lickable and non-lickable stamps -- his name is Don Smeraldi -- was only too happy to help me out ... "It's happened really quickly," Smeraldi told me. "In 1995, just under 20 percent of postage stamps were self-adhesive." ... from the 20 percent share that self-adhesive stamps owned in 1995, the number leapt to over 60 percent in 1996, over 87 percent in 1999, and over 90 percent in 2000.

I was a teenager in the 1990s.  You were... umm, well actually you weren't yet.

[webny99]

I was a teenager in the 1990s.  You were... umm, well actually you weren't yet.

I actually was alive for the last few months of the 1990's (which I'm honored by, BTW), but I don't remember doing any stamp licking. 

[JayhawkCO]

What do postage stamps taste like?

Have you seriously never licked a stamp?

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Uh... no. I've used saliva to seal an envelope a few times, but the only kind of stamps I'm familiar with are self-adhesive.

It tastes the same as the envelope adhesive basically.

[bandit957]

Back in the '90s, people had to mail stuff more.

[abefroman329]

My brother has said that he doesn't like the Coke Freestyle machines because his drink tastes like every other drink the machine offers, but since I'm mixing two or more pops anyway, I don't notice.

[wanderer2575]

The restaurant tastes like a postage stamp?

[kphoger]

The restaurant tastes like a postage stamp?

He could have written 'Soft drinks tasting like postage stamps in restaurants' instead.  Then you'd be wondering why stamps taste different in restaurants than elsewhere.

[Rothman]

The snozzberries taste like postage stamps.

[vdeane]

I wonder why self-adhesive envelopes didn't take off the way self-adhesive stamps did.  I always buy them, but most envelopes I mail are birthday cards or the rare bill that I still get by mail rather than online, so that doesn't help much.

[Rothman]

I wonder why self-adhesive envelopes didn't take off the way self-adhesive stamps did.  I always buy them, but most envelopes I mail are birthday cards or the rare bill that I still get by mail rather than online, so that doesn't help much.

Larger envelopes did.

[formulanone]

Can't say I've had a postage stamp flavored shake.

Culver's new Nostalgic Flavor of the Day.

I've had a Lenny's Sub in Memphis that tasted faintly of soap, so I've avoided them since.

[bandit957]

Back around 2001, I remember that French fries at fast food restaurants usually tasted a little bit like soap. Apparently, it was some ingredient they started using at the time.

[jeffandnicole]

Back around 2001, I remember that French fries at fast food restaurants usually tasted a little bit like soap. Apparently, it was some ingredient they started using at the time.

We were at a restaurant recently where the mashed potatoes tasted way off, like there was some sort of metallic taste to them. We told our server who got the manager. The manager wrote it off as it was too much garlic. Now, we arent newborns. We didnt start eating foods yesterday. Wasn't a garlic issue. The server came by later to tell us she ate the mashed potatoes as part of her meal earlier and she thought they tasted off too but they weren't going to listen to her. She hoped us saying something would be taken more seriously.

[Scott5114]

I wonder why self-adhesive envelopes didn't take off the way self-adhesive stamps did.  I always buy them, but most envelopes I mail are birthday cards or the rare bill that I still get by mail rather than online, so that doesn't help much.

It always seemed to me like self-adhesive envelopes don't stay closed as well as the kind you lick, so I stopped buying them. Plus, unlike with self-adhesive stamps, which are all stuck to a common backing you don't have to deal with until you use all of the stamps, self-adhesive envelopes have that strip you have to throw away on every envelope you use. That seems like it would become a hassle if you had 20 or 30 envelopes you had to send out.