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If you're going to savor one of the last cans of Tab, you need to let it chill properly

Tab in the snow

Liz Lemongrab spotted this can of Tab that somebody in Jamaica Plain was getting ready today with help from nature's icebox.

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Brings back high school memories.

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I grew up on that, Shasta and RC cola...

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TAB was once a premium brand, discontinued this year. RC and Shasta have always been white-trash soda and are available wherever the Waltons have a aisled warehouse of crap to sell.

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fried Spam or Vienna sausage sandwiches and a handful of Funyuns... yummy!

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TAB was a premium brand? No - just a proto diet soda.
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Royal Crown and Shasta (and C&C, too!) were simply smaller or regional brands. Actual colas (like Polar used to have) and available in lots of places where Walmart wasn't even in the market.

Couldn't tell you the last time I saw C&C.
RC... I think I actually saw their brand a couple of years ago on the soda fountains on the Bridgeport/PortJeff ferry.
Shasta... I think I saw them sometime in the last few years on patient trays at BIDMC - gotta get that 7 oz ginger ale somewhere!

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RC Cola was in Wegmans and Shaws/Star before the pandemic cut soda varieties due to the aluminum shortage.

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I absolutely loved Polar Cola. It was the best. But a Polar representative once told me there was no demand for it, so it ceased. I'm old enough to remember when there were a wide array of colas to choose from. This has now shrunk down to only Pepsi and Coke and a handful of supermarket and store brands. The general public has very narrow tastes.

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"No demand for it" often means "We stopped producing it for some reason, then sales dropped off when there wasn't any for the stores to sell, so plummeting sales = no demand."
I trace it (in my personal paranoia conspiracy-theory world) to Coca-Cola's polar bear ad campaign, which was massive when it first came out and is still part of their branding today. Coke steamrolled Polar legally/financially. No way (in Jimmy Stewart's America) should Coke have been able to use such an image so similar to a competitor's to sell something in the same market segment (cola). Coke is the heavyweight, though, and could spend a lot to destroy a little regional outfit like Polar. I suspect it was an "offer" to mostly drop cola in exchange for keeping the seltzer and tonic business that was the best deal they were going to get.
Add to that, at the end the only Polar Cola was decaf. "No demand", indeed!

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It's being discontinued this month.

That having been said, Star and Stop & Shop used to carry it, next to the Moxie, so maybe if you look, you might get lucky.

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How many of you are old enough to remember this?

(I thought for sure this was in color, but I've found only black and white online so far)

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It's probably a black and white film. That was a common way of recording TV even in the color era.

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About two years ago I saw a sixpack of Tab at the Shaws in East Boston. I bought it for nostalgia's sake. It was AWFUL and tasted NOTHING like the Tab I knew in the 60s and 70s. They must have changed the formula severely. I will not miss it.

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Only slightly less appealing than about 300 used cigarette butts in a snowbank outside a bar.

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Leave it alone

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I'll forever associate Tab with a woman with whom I kept company around 1970. She was a clotheshorse as in-house fashion models called each other. When store buyers came to see the line, these women would parade it.

She was quite slender and monitored every calorie. Tab was key for her. She also drank the dreadful mix of Tab and Dewars. I didn't care for the soda, much less so with that watery whisky. When I drank lower-end malt, it was more likely Johnny Red for Black — stuff with some oomph. She did get me to taste her favorite cocktail...once.

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