Kellogg’s Rice Krispies
$3.49 for 10 oz. box
$5.58 per pound
Kellogg’s Complete Oat Bran
$4.49 for 14.8 oz. box
$4.85 per pound
General Mills’ Cocoa Puffs
$4.69 for 19.5 oz. box
$3.85 per pound
Post’s Total
$4.99 for 18 oz. box
$4.44 per pound
Apple Jacks
$3.69 for 11 oz. box
$5.37 per pound
Quaker Quisp
$2.99 for 9 oz.
$5.32 per pound
Quaker Cap’n Crunch
$3.99 for 16. oz.
$3.99 per pound
Now, since I’m just paying for dried processed flakes with some sugar in 'em, why on Earth does breakfast cereal cost as much as it does? Seems a bit of price gouging is involved here. I can buy cuts of meat cheaper by the pound than this.
Essentially, lots of advertising and lots of coupons, which tend to make people loyal to name brands, even though the generic competition may be virtually identical.
And for the record, it’s not gouging. Gouging is only when the price is raised significantly above the regular selling price. Cereal is and always has been expensive.
Gouging is only that when it is taking advantage of an emergency situation by raising the price for a necessity (such as charging $20/gallon for bottled water and $20/can of soup when there is a hurricane approaching). It is a natural byproduct of a pure market system, but is considered considered wrong, due to its predatory nature.
You don’t need breakfast cereal, under any situation. If you don’t like the price, don’t buy it. If enough people do this, the price will come down (refer to a high-school economics text if you need a better explanation).
There is a high demand for breakfast cereal because it’s EASY. A parent can spend 20 seconds fixing their kid a bowl of cold cereal and feel like they are providing a healthy meal.
Name brand cereal is also a LOT more expensive than the generic brands, especially the kinds that come in bags. Breakfast cereals advertising is very common, and often quite expensive as a lot of it involves animation (generally high quality animation when compared to your typical Saturday morning cartoon or ‘The Simpsons’). Kids also get attached to certain name brands and it’s often easier for a parent to spend an extra $2 or so to make the kid happy instead of dealing with them whining and refusing to eat ‘Tasty Fruit Os’ instead of ‘Fruit Loops’.
Once, on a parenting newsgroup, I saw a post by an American mother who was at her wit’s end with the weekly grocery bill. She was cutting corners where she could, but her kids dug in their heels and refused to eat, among other things, the store-brand cereals. “I never have time to cook breakfast in the morning,” she sighed, “so they have to eat cereal!”
And that is another part of the reason cereal is so expensive. Americans are convinced that only “breakfast” foods can be eaten at breakfast time. Since cereal is by far the most convenient of these designated breakfast foods, the cereal manufacturers have a semi-captive market.
Grain from a feed and seed store is not intended for human consumption. It may contain fungicides and herbicides not approved for use on human food. Quaker Oats got into a heap of trouble about five or ten years ago for using grain grown as livestock feed in human food. (IIRC, it wasn’t their fault; it had been sold to them fraudulently).
I very rarely eat breakfast cereal, and when I do it’s usually the generic stuff in a bag. I more often eat uncooked oatmeal with milk (with no sweetener). People think I’m crazy for eating it uncooked, but I don’t like the texture of cooked oatmeal. I pay 59¢ a pound for thick-rolled oats at the health food store. Oatmeal is almost a dollar a pound at the grocery store.
Another thing that has increased the overall purchase price (not necessarily the retail price) is that the cereal coupons have gotten a lot less attractive lately. I remember my college days where almost every cereal coupon was from $1.00 to $1.50 off per box. Couple that with a store sale, and cereal didn’t have to be expensive.
But no longer! I go through the coupon pages every Sunday, and at least 90% of the cereal ones are now save $1.00 on two boxes; or even three boxes. How disappointing. At least if they just made it a $0.50 coupon for one box, the store could double it.
I’ve got a problem with Mr. Saxon’s method. While he states that the ingredients necessary to prepare his survival-nut cereal cost only 3.3 cents, the time it would take to prepare that mush is exorbitant.
Using the rate at which my company bills my time as a very unrealistic measuring stick, I estimate that it would take at least $50 of my time to prepare that. Aside from monetary issues, I would rather spend what little time I have doing something other than home brewing gruel.
Perhaps if one is living the hunter/gatherer/survivalist lifestyle, spending this kind of time is acceptable. However, given my admittedly yuppie lifestyle, I’d rather spend the $5.00 on a box of Golden Grahams and be done with it.
My priorities are obviously different than Mr. Saxon’s. That’s what makes this world so interesting.
But seriously, Handy has the right idea. Start with some basic oats or flakes from a generic bin and toss in some rasins from another generic bin. (Don’t do this at the store, they get mad). You can come up with a tasty cereal that way & probably beat the boxed prices by at least half.
In a free market economy, there is no such thing as a price that is “too high” or “too low”; every price is exactly is exactly what it should be. And every price is determined by supply and demand. Period.
I’m always humored when someone says, “I don’t think the price of [insert product/service here] is determined by supply and demand.” Of course, closer inspection will always reveal they’re wrong.
Now some may argue that certain products/services do not obey the laws of supply and demand due to a “monopolistic” architecture. While this may be true if said product/service were operated as a true monopoly, such is rarely the case.
Bibliophage is right of course. If fact it’s probably likley that they contain fungicides and herbicides not approved for use on human food because this would reduce the cost of consumption. I originally posted that as food for thought, but now I’m beginning to regret it.
