My wife has issues with hard to swallow pills and the other 500mg tablets, although smaller than 1000mg, are always those round (as in circular and flat, not circular) pills with the razor sharp edges and chalkiness designed specifically to make you puke as they get stuck in the throat.<br /><br />So enter the VitaminShoppe "easy to swallow" vitamin C ... This seemed like a good idea but somehow they made it far bigger than a typical 500mg vitamin C. It's nearly as big as a 1000mg vitamin C, certainly much wider in the middle, the volume I'm sure is the same if not larger. So I cut one open and squirted out the goo and tasted it. I happen to drink a lot of vitamin C powder, and this tastes way different ... like it's spiked with lecithin. Gross combo, but hey ... I don't care because you don't normally taste it, but makes me wonder why all that non-vitamin C filler? Looking at the "other ingredients" I'm guessing half the volume is soybean oil. Why? You're trying to make it small easy to swallow then why do that? Dumb.<br /><br />So here's the deal, vitamin C manufacturers (and I'm pretending they will even read this, which I know is bunk, but just bear with me here and let me pretend, okay?): Vitamin C is the highest consumed supplement on the planet. There is a TON of vitamin C consumed everyday, and if you can just get a tiny piece of that market, hey, you're doing pretty good. Here's how: make a freaking 500mg vitamin C tablet that is no larger than it needs to be (no fillers, not a bunch of beads in a capsule full of air), which is smooth (no sharp edges), well shaped for easy swallowing (ellipsoid, like this one, but not so huge), and slippery and doesn't dissolve until after it's in the tummy so it doesn't taste gross. Is that a hard thing to do? Because NOBODY is making that. Nobody. Lost opportunity, guys.<br /><br />Now that said, my wife said this is hard to swallow, but maybe not as hard as my 1000mg tablets, but that's ridiculous, this is half the mass, it should be a ton easier. Ascorbic acid absorbs extremely well, so you don't need to add stuff like add soybean oil ... as if that would help (it doesn't). Okay, rant over.

I could have gone to the actual Vitamin Shoppe for these vitamins, and now that I've received them, I know I should have. There are two types of straight Vitamin C 1,000MG softgels available at The Vitamin Shoppe. One of them allows you to take one pill per day to get the 1,000, which is significantly more convenient, especially for someone who takes a crap ton of medications and supplements every day to function. The other requires you to take two of them per day. Unfortunately, this purchase ended up being the second type, which I did not want. If there had been a photo of the back of the bottle, outlining the directions, I would have known to not purchase this product. A failure of The Vitamin Shoppe for not outlining their product and its directions properly, and a failure on my part for moving forward without that information.

I like the softgels as they are easy to swallow. They arrived when I wass told they would.

These are listed in the item name and in the picture as 1000MG (300 Softgels). What I received was labeled 1000MG per 2 softgels (300 softgels). Meaning they were only 500MG per pill. The result is I only received half the amount that I purchased. I have complained and asked the seller to make up the amount that they shorted me. I will update the review if they make it right.<br /><br />UPDATE: The seller has done the right thing and refunded the full purchase price.

The worst is a "tablet" that has no coating, but only a rough surface. Next worse is a big capsule.<br /><br />These C's aren't even capsules. They don't "come apart." They're more like blobs. They have a little bit of a texture, but I think the texture is engineered to make these easy to swallow. I wish all the supplements were available in Easy-To-Swallow.

For people who have issues with the chalkiness of Vitamin C tablets or the giant size of the capsules - and who don't want all the sugar in the Vitamin C gummy bears - these pills are a great alternative. Very easy to swallow with a smooth surface and compact, rounded shape.