Even with sea gulls circling, waves crashing and the smell of suntan lotion providing delicious distractions, it still takes a few days for vacationing PR and IR executives to force their brains into vacation mode.

Visiting the Narragansett, RI, Dollar Tree location was meant to be a simple stock-up for provisions missing from our beach cottage.  Instead, it turned into a bizarre “what if?” exercise about the brands we knew and loved when corporate communications was a simpler business.

Walking through the discount retailer’s aisles was like visiting a brand graveyard and exhuming familiar products that conjure up powerful memories.

Mallo Cup and Charleston Chew feature prominently in the candy selection.  In the breakfast aisle, Kellogg’s hasn’t paid a premium to occupy prime real estate, so shoppers get to experience Toast ‘Em breakfast pastries rather than Pop Tarts.

Remember when Lavoris stood proudly among Listerine and Scope as a leading mouthwash? Or when Bugles corn chips commanded the same respect as Fritos.

If Dollar Tree was a B2B supermarket offering steeply discounted services that still worked fine, but lacked advertising support or the latest technology update, what brands would we find?

Thick, phonebook-sized directories figured prominently in our industry a decade or two ago. IR officers religiously thumbed through the Nelson’s directory of analysts while the PR function carefully guarded their Bacon’s book of media contacts.  They’d definitely appear in the PR/IR dollar store.

Some of the earliest digital tools would be on the shelves, too.  The Reuters-owned Inc.Link product was the first generation of what we know today as the IR web site.  PR Newswire morphed Inc.Link into Virtual IQ, which Thomson then turned into its competitor to CCBN.

Streetfusion was another oldie but goodie, publishing a calendar of corporate earnings calls and webcasting them for investors.

Unlike consumer food and beauty products, most of the deceased PR/IR brands truthfully could not survive in a heavily discounted B2B environment equivalent to the Dollar Tree.  There are big data-gathering, fact-checking and technology costs to produce a product of high enough quality for corporate customers.

So even though Wyler’s lemonade is the powdered drink mix of choice at the Dollar Tree, it’s unlikely corporate buyers will be willing to drink the Kool-Aid offered by familiar suppliers of years gone by. Even for a buck.