On the Side: Do we feel less ardor for the Kiss?

It is said that the Hershey Kiss got its name not from the language of love (as you might suspect), but from the sound of its manufacture - the audible smack of dabs of chocolate as they were extruded onto the surface of conveyor belts.

Prosaic as that may be, the candies were a hit from the start (in 1907). Nowadays, 80 million still spill off Hershey's production lines daily.

Which is why a bit of news about them struck me last week: The Kiss, it appeared, was wearing out its welcome.

That tidbit was buried in an otherwise upbeat report on the health of Hershey's profits - up 51 percent in the fourth quarter, even as the economy continued to tank.

And, yes, there was a certain dog-bites-man aspect to the overall picture. Sales of chocolates have reliably spiked in hard times: Pink slips make you cling all the tighter to Valentine's Day.

Across the board, cheap and sweet, salt and fat are proving as resilient as ever. The robust sales of Big Macs, Campbell's soups, Spam and Hershey's chocolate recently prompted columnist Frank Rich to designate them "the four food groups of the apocalypse."

But what of the Kiss? It had been the one notable drag, said Hershey CEO David West, on mid-price sales that had benefited from the retreat from premium chocolate, boosting demand for Hershey bars, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and Kit Kat wafers. (Sales at gas stations also climbed as gas prices dropped.)

The sin of the Kiss, though, wasn't what it had seemed at first: It wasn't boredom or changing tastes or overfamiliarity, romance killers in any era.

No, as the Wall Street Journal summed up West's mea culpa, it was just the opposite; "the brand suffered from an abundance of Kisses varieties."

In other words, a brand that had made its bones with a singular and enduring image (though a taste far inferior to my favorite, the pioneering Wilbur Bud) had been so tampered with and re-engineered that it had lost its identity.

In the trade, such tweaking is called "line extension." It is, at bottom, imagination fatigue. It is how we ended up with abominations like apple strudel bagels, and once-endearing Easter Peeps recast as a rogue's gallery of goblins and snowmen and so on.

Is is how, over the years, the silver Kiss was re-colored - red and green for Christmas; then pastel for Easter. In 1991 it debuted in harvest gold.

There would soon be Hugs, enrobed white-chocolate swirls. And dark chocolate numbers, and ones with almonds, and year-round Kisses of chocolate mint and cherry cordial creme, and limited editions of New York Style cheesecake and mint truffle, candy corn and pumpkin spice, close to three dozen flavors, squeezing every ounce of mileage out of the chocolate drop.

The creed of line extension is to take a good thing and make too much of it.

It is the same impluse, really, that got us into the economic mess: Making a bundle in real estate? Call more things "real estate"!

In the giddy run-up, sufficiency never sufficed: One golden egg a day didn't cut it.

It's still the same old story.

There

can

be too much of a good thing.

Sometimes it

is

best to leave well enough alone.

Maybe what we wanted, after all, was a Kiss that was just a Kiss.

.