Kinetics constitutes a core topic in both the lecture and laboratory components of lower- level chemistry courses. While textbook examples can ignore issues of time, temperature and safety, the laboratory can not. Reactions must occur slowly enough to be detected by students, occur rapidly enough for data collection in the few hours assigned to a laboratory period, be safe enough to be handled by students, and be simple enough to provide easily interpreted data. Few reactions meet these restrictions. We report here a new, inexpensive ([tilde]5 cents/student), environmentally benign system involving the reaction of FD&C Red #3 and hypochlorite. Students use a desktop visible spectrophotometer to quantitatively follow the rate of disappearance of the colored reagent under a variety of initial conditions. The first-order reaction in both dye and bleach yields simple data that students can easily process and graph using spreadsheet software to obtain the rate constant and the rate law. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table, and 1 note.)