How to Fight Back Against Overpriced Cereal

This is part two of a two-part series on cereals: If you haven't already, please see part one: Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal.
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In my prior post, I discussed the various offensive marketing techniques that cereal manufacturers use in their efforts to maintain high prices. Today's post will suggest ways for consumers to fight back.

Read the net weight and do some quick math
This first tip is simple and instinctive for many frugal grocery shoppers, but it serves three non-obvious purposes. First, it will help you compare cereal prices fairly across brands sold at different weights. Second, it exposes just how preposterously expensive most cereal brands truly are. Third, you'll catch any and all examples of stealth price hikes.

First, look at the net weight number on the front of the box, and do the math on how much you are actually spending per pound of food. Remember, a 12-ounce box of cereal priced at a seemingly acceptable $4.99 really costs $6.65 per pound. That $6.65 could instead pay for 3 dozen eggs, or, shockingly, 13 pounds of generic oatmeal. You can get much more value for your money on almost any other breakfast food, a subject we'll address in a moment.

But the most important benefit by far from paying attention to the net weight information on cereal boxes is that you'll never again be tricked by a sneaky stealth price hike.

Instant retribution
But why stop at just noticing a stealth price hike? Why not punish the cereal maker with instant retribution?

From now on, whenever you see a company pull this stunt, punish them right then and there by not making the purchase. If there's ever a time to drop a product and change brands, it's immediately after a stealth hike. I believe that we have an obligation as consumers to vote with our wallets and show food companies that they will lose sales and market share for using ethically questionable pricing techniques.

Scan the ingredients
Food manufacturers are required to list all ingredients in their foods in order of their preponderance. Thus if you see sugar, high-fructose corn syrup or any other sweetener in the first two or three ingredients of any cereal, just put it back on the shelf. You're better off eating real food. The same goes for salt/sodium chloride.

And if you think it takes too much time to scan ingredient lists while you're in the grocery store, keep reading. At the end of this essay, I'll give you two examples of how, in just seconds, you can extract valuable information from any ingredient label. That's time well invested in my view.

Boycott brands that market aggressively to children
We've talked in Part 1 of this series about how our youngest consumers are often least able to defend themselves against well-crafted marketing and advertising. And many parents will tell you that children can be shockingly brand-conscious. That's why, unfortunately, it's often a really good investment for cereal companies to spend large sums of money to advertise directly to children (this logic holds true in the toy, clothing and media industries as well).

Once again, we can vote with our pocketbooks and simply not buy these products. When companies recognize that it will cost them profits rather than earn them profits by marketing aggressively to children, they'll change their behavior. And perhaps then we'll have a healthier, less consumerist generation growing up behind us.

Screw cereal: try other foods for breakfast
There is a virtual infinity of breakfast foods available to us, ranging from healthy and laughably cheap oatmeal to perfectly boiled eggs to breakfast burritos, to fresh fruit and yogurt. Eggs are a particularly good example of a healthy food that can be endlessly varied, and at around $2 a dozen you can eat up to 15 breakfasts for the price of a single box of cereal.

Here are some more ideas for cereal substitutes: simple bread and cheese; two or three pieces of fresh fruit, bagels with toppings of your choice, smoothies, simple energy-dense meats or sausages, cold cuts with or without bread, etc. Heck, even cold pizza can be a satisfying breakfast food on occasion. And there are still more reader suggestions for alternate breakfast foods in the comments section of yesterday's post.

Every single one of these breakfast food ideas is significantly cheaper on a per-calorie and per-pound basis than branded boxed cereal, and not a single one of them will give you a sugar high or make your teeth hurt.

Be a swing voter
In the political area, the term "swing voter" refers to voters who are willing to vote for either party, depending on the issues or the candidate. They are the most coveted of all voters, and they tend to get the most attention--and concessions--when election time rolls around.

I want you to think of your consumption patterns in exactly the same way. Consumers are rarely rewarded for mindless loyalty, and for those consumers who are willing to "swing" from brand to brand, there are all sorts of deals and incentives out there.

Every company in the food industry wants more market share, and many will dangle juicy incentives in front of you--including coupons, buy one get one free deals and other enticements--to get you to try their products. Why not take advantage? If you see an attractive incentive for an alternate brand, try it. You might like the product even more than your regular brand, and if it's cheaper, so much the better.

Obviously you can't do this simultaneously with all of your product buying decisions, or your weekly grocery trips will end up being day-long exercises in decision-making. And I never encourage using coupons as a reason to buy food products you don't need.

But each week, why not grab one or two of those juicy, dangling incentives and see if it introduces you to a better and cheaper version of something you already buy? (NB: For further reading on how to grapple with the dizzying array of choices available to consumers, I highly recommend reading The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz).

In politics, it's the swing voters who often carry the day in a competitive election. In the ultra-competitive food industry, the same could be said for swinging consumers (and no, I don't mean that kind of swinging).

Readers, what other suggestions do you have to fight back against the cereal cabal?
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Addendum: How to Extract Information from an Ingredient List in Just Seconds
I'll close this post with two photos of cereal ingredient lists and a brief demonstration of how you can extract valuable information from these lists with just a quick glance.

Remember, the higher up an ingredient is on the list, the greater its prevalence in the food, so all you really need to do is read the first four or five ingredients. If you're not happy about the nature of those four or five ingredients, you won't be happy with most of what's in the cereal. Thus it takes just a few seconds for you to extract all of the information you need to make a highly informed buying decision.

The most sobering thing you'll find when doing this exercise is how heavily most branded cereals depend on sweeteners, salt and artificial ingredients. Here's a quick look at the ingredients in Cocoa Puffs:



Shockingly, the first ingredient isn't sugar. But the next two ingredients are sweeteners, and the fourth ingredient is a thickening agent. It's not until the fifth ingredient, cocoa, that we arrive at what is more or less an actual food. Other than that, it looks like salt, anti-caking agents and artificial flavors dominate the remainder of this ingredient list. Yummy.

Oh, and did anyone notice the irony of Cocoa Puffs receiving a seal of approval from the American Heart Association?

Okay, here's the ingredients list for Corn Pops:


Here, our second, third and fourth ingredients are all sweeteners. Followed deliciously by salt. Put this box down and slowly walk away.

Related Posts:
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How are You Adjusting to the Economic Crisis? A Question for CK Readers
Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs
Mastering Kitchen Setup Costs
How to Write an Effective Complaint Letter



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal

This is part one of a two-part series on branded boxed cereals.
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Here at Casual Kitchen, we have completely banned sweetened and processed cereals from our pantry. These sugar- and salt-laden quasi-foods are one of the most pernicious rip-offs in the entire food industry.

They are wastefully and often deceivingly packaged. On a per-pound basis they cost more than expensive cuts of meat. And worst of all, they often target the consumers among us who are least able to resist: our children.

Today's article will expose some of the noxious marketing methods practiced in the cereal industry. In a few days, I'll follow up with a post that suggests some ways to fight back.

Let's start by asking a fundamental question: why is cereal so expensive? How do these companies get away with charging so much money for such unhealthy food?

Here's how. First, just a few large cereal manufacturers control the distribution channels to your grocery store, limiting competition and giving them pricing power similar to those of spice manufacturers. Second, cereal is a particularly egregious example of a second order food, larded up with an enormous stack of processing costs, advertising costs and packaging costs that get passed to you as the consumer.

But perhaps the sneakiest and most anti-consumer trick these companies use is the stealth price hike, where the manufacturer keeps the price of the cereal the same, but reduces the amount of product sold in the box. This technique is used widely throughout the consumer products industry, and it's effective primarily because most consumers simply don't notice.

Classy, right? Well, imagine if you were a cereal manufacturer and you used this sneaky technique repeatedly over a period of years. Your one-pound, $4.99 box of cereal would shrink to 15 ounces, then 14.5 ounces, then 13 ounces, then 12 ounces. It's worth noting that a 12 ounce box of cereal priced at $4.99 really costs $6.65 per pound!

Do these food manufacturers actually consider this a viable long-term pricing strategy? Something tells me that ten years from now, when we're paying $4.99 for a half-ounce box of cereal, consumers might begin to see through this.

Even the way cereal is sold to us is a sham. Walk down your local grocery store's cereal aisle and you'll see row after row of extremely tall, skinny and lightweight boxes. There would be far less packaging waste and it would be far more efficient to transport cereal if it were packed in shorter, cube-shaped boxes, but tall, skinny boxes look like they are bigger.

Thus, thanks to the many thousands of hours the cereal cabal has spent test marketing product shapes and sizes, your cereal comes to you inefficiently packaged--and costs, waste and efficiency be damned.

Of course there's an irony here: when every brand uses identical tricks, nobody stands out. That's why, when you wander unsuspectingly into your grocery store's cereal aisle, you get blinded by this:


Just look at that picture for a few seconds and tell me it doesn't make both your eyes and your teeth hurt.

And by the end of my third bowl [of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs], I usually feel sick.
--Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes

I suppose the most pernicious aspect of the cereal industry is this: there are well-researched reasons why these products are branded and packaged the way they are, with bright colors and cartoon characters. Everything is designed to grab the eyes of your children.

The implicit presumption is that the child, not the parent, makes the buying decision in the grocery store. Moreover, your kids also serve as an indirect reason why these cereals are saturated in sugar and sodium. Children tend to prefer simple tastes like sweet and salty (admittedly, many adults do too), so they gravitate towards cereals that contain extra high-fructose corn syrup and salt.

As consumers, we need to use our collective economic clout and show the companies who make these quasi-foods that we will no longer tolerate cereals that are unhealthy, overpriced and questionably marketed. We want something better. In a few days I'll go over some ideas on how to fight back.
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Readers, tune in tomorrow for the next column in this series: How to Fight Back Against Overpriced Cereal!

Related Posts:
Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs
Ten Tips to Save Money on Spices and Seasonings
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
How to Make a Simple Frittata
When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You




How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Write an Effective Complaint Letter

It's not often that I write complaint letters. But every once in a while, when a particularly poor product combines with me being in a particularly combative mood, I'll fire one off. This time around it was a package of bizarrely mangled bacon that got me riled up.

From the outside of the package it looked like totally normal bacon, but once I opened it up I saw that I had been tricked. The top few slices were smushed all around the rest of the bacon stack, and there was a huge gash in the middle of the stack, essentially severing all of the slices in half right through the middle. No way was I going to be able to make bacon slices here. Try bacon shreds.

Was I annoyed? Yes. Was this the end of the world? No--because I channeled my annoyance into a terse and manipulative complaint letter.

So, today I will share six tips on how to write an effective complaint letter. I’ll also share the text of my “bacon letter” below so you can look over an example.

1) Do it NOW
There are two key reasons why you want to bang this letter out now and get it over with.

First, tackling the complaint letter immediately makes more efficient use of your time. The details are fresh in your mind and the faulty product, receipts and paperwork are right there in front of you. Even the irritation and annoyance is fresh in your mind, so you can capitalize on it by channeling that negative energy into pounding out an impassioned complaint. You’d be surprised how easy it is to write when you’re truly annoyed by something, and that’s far preferable to letting those frustrations eat away at you. If you wait a few days, the details will begin to fade, the emotional immediacy is no longer there waiting to be channeled, and as a result it will take you much longer to hammer out the letter.

Note that I suggested that you write the letter right away, but not mail the letter right away. Let the draft of the letter sit overnight so you can look at it with fresh eyes the next morning. This will stop you from sending out a letter that’s excessively harsh or brutal (some people call this the “Harry Truman rule”), and you’ll be better able to catch any malingering typos and grammatical errors you’d otherwise miss.

Second, a timely complaint letter helps the company too. In our bacon example, it doesn’t really help a company to hear about a mangled bacon problem if they sold the last of that product lot off the shelves three months ago. Timeliness is especially important for mass-produced products where a production problem can quickly grow out of control and affect thousands, if not millions, of products. If your complaint gets to them in a timely manner, you’ll be alerting them in time for them perhaps to do something about it before it cascades out of control. Of course, if they choose to ignore you, that’s their own fault.

2) Start off by killing 'em with kindness
I always open a complaint letter with a sentence or two about how dedicated a customer I am. I typically don’t have to stretch the truth to say this. If I weren’t a dedicated customer I wouldn't bother to write the letter in the first place--I'd just vote with my feet and change brands. In the example letter at the bottom of this post you can see that I start of by saying how my wife and I are "happy shoppers" at the company's store. Opening with a positive lead like this makes you sound like a customer that's worth the company's time and effort to keep happy.

3) Be concise and keep it simple
Keep your letter as brief and as simple as possible and only stick to the facts. Use simple sentence structure. As obvious as this advice may sound, you'd be surprised how rarely it gets followed--in any form of writing.

You are not the Apostle Paul sending a 20-page epistle to the Colossians; you're trying to get a few bucks in coupons. You can hold back on the purple prose and you can save the tortured metaphors and multiple clauses for your novel. If you can’t state your problem in a couple of brief paragraphs (or heck, in a couple of brief sentences), you’re overthinking things and wasting what little precious time you have on this earth.

4) Include the purchase date, package code, sell-by date and any other identifying codes, and include a copy of your receipt
Believe it or not, many companies actually want to fix quality problems and make customers happy. You need to include as much specific purchase information as you can in your correspondence so the vendor vendor can identify from which lot the product came and in which factory or location it was made. It allows them to track down the origins of the problem. Thus it is absolutely critical that you supply them with all of the dates and codes that you find on the product packaging as well as where and when you bought the product.

5) State specifically what you want in return
I'm not looking for a multi-million dollar windfall here--I usually just ask for a refund of my purchase price. Usually companies have standard practices they follow for consumer complaints, and typically they will refund the price paid. Fair is fair.

But that doesn’t mean that given unusual circumstances you can’t ask for more. My all-time personal favorite complaint letter moment came several years ago, after lengthy and repeated periods of poor TV and internet service from our (unnamed) cable provider. I chose to capitalize on a moment of extreme irritation (I think we had just lost service right in the middle of a brand new X-Files episode) to pound out a particularly harsh complaint letter. And in blatant contravention of the Harry Truman rule, I mailed it out right away and left most of the vitriol in there. On top of that, I copied the letter to the state cable TV regulator's office. Talk about channeling your frustration!

I asked for three free months of cable and internet service and I actually got it. I received in that one refund more value than I'll probably get in refunds over the rest of my life. Ah, it was my finest hour, complaint-letter-wise at least. I wish I still had a copy of that letter somewhere!

6) Make it fun!
Life is too short to stay bitter for long on something like a faulty product or customer service experience. Use the complaint letter as a way to let off steam and channel your frustration. And certainly recognize that you can’t really do this to make money--you're not going to earn a meaningful return on your time if you spend it writing letters for $2.99 refunds like the one I wrote below.

Do this for fun. If the words aren’t flowing, just let it go. Obviously your time is the most valuable asset here, and if a task like this takes you an inordinately long amount of time, you have to question the point of doing it at all, unless you want to use it as an opportunity to improve at business letter writing.

Finally, I've included the text of my "bacon letter" to share with you a typical example of a complaint letter. I wrote this letter in about 15-20 minutes. You could argue, based on a $2.99 refund request and 20 minutes of time spent, that I am trading my time for less than $9.00 per hour in compensation. But let me add that in those 15-20 minutes I went from an emotional state that I can only describe as “highly annoyed” to a state of smug self-satisfaction. Heck, people pay therapists $150 an hour to do the same thing!

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January 6, 2008

(unnamed grocery store), Inc.
123 Whatever Street,
City, ST 10270

Dear Sir or Madam:

My wife and I have been happy shoppers at the (unnamed grocery store) for several years. However, I wanted to let you know that I purchased a one pound package of (unnamed grocery store) brand bacon on December 29th that was in unsatisfactory condition. I’ve included the purchase information below.

The problem was with the slicing and stacking of the bacon. First, the top two or three slices of bacon were mangled and twisted around the remaining stack of bacon slices. Second, the entire package of bacon looked like it had been accidentally cut almost totally in half, right through the middle. There appears to be some quality control problems with the slicing mechanism used by your bacon manufacturing contractor.

The bacon tasted fine and was otherwise satisfactory. However, it looked highly unappealing coming out of the packaging. Furthermore, because of the condition it was in, the bacon could not be cooked in slices. Each individual slice of bacon fell apart into multiple pieces when I attempted to peel it off the stack.

Again, we remain happy customers of (unnamed grocery store) and of (unnamed grocery store) branded products. I wanted to notify you of this one quality failure and request a refund of my $2.99 purchase price. My receipt is enclosed.

Sincerely,


Daniel Koontz


Purchase Information:
Store Location: (redacted)
Purchase Receipt Information: 12/29/07 12:48PM 284 12 329 129
(Company name redacted) Sliced Bacon Lot #: EST 7202 N2
Sell-by date: Feb 25, 2008

Fake Maple Syrup

I wrote a really positive post on Tabasco Sauce a few days ago, so in the interests of journalistic balance (and so I don’t seem like just another product flack), I decided to do a negative piece this time.

So today you’re going to read a piece condemning fake “syrup”.

A polemic. A denunciation, dripping with invective. A jeremiad. A screed, if you will.

Okay, so maybe you can tell by now that I, uh, don’t really like fake syrup. And it’s not just the taste. It’s more the phony-ness. The chemicals. The fact that we already get too much “high fructose corn syrup” in our diets as it is.

So to convince you, and to turn your stomach a little bit today, I’d like you to try a quick little exercise with me:

Let’s take a quick look at a highly typical phony syrup: Aunt Jemima. I’d like you to take a look at their “Original” syrup product page. After you go to that link, click where it says “Ingredients.”

Wow. Ewww. So this is what you are putting into your body when you eat this brownish-colored industrial goo:

INGREDIENTS: CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, WATER, CELLULOSE GUM, CARAMEL COLOR, SALT, SODIUM BENZOATE AND SORBIC ACID (PRESERVATIVES), ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL FLAVORS, SODIUM HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE.

Do they think they are doing a good job selling the product by putting that information on their webpage? I’d call that some pretty suspect work from the marketing department. Most people (including me) can’t even pronounce “sodium hexametaphosphate” much less do we want to ingest it. PS: does anybody out there care to weigh in on what the heck that chemical actually does? Is it toxic?

Maybe the hardworking webmasters at The Quaker Oats Company should just stick with simple pictures of the bottle, a smiling drawing of Aunt Jemima’s face… and just leave out the nauseating ingredients part

This is why you should ONLY use real maple syrup in your home. It’s delicious, it’s actually a real product, it keeps nearly forever, and it doesn’t contain sodium hexametawhatever.

To learn more about pure maple syrups from New York State, I encourage you to start with the New York State Maple Producers Association website. They have a thorough list of syrup producers here.

And if you want to learn about different syrup grades, take a look here. Keep in mind that in addition to New York, Vermont and Pennsylvania are well-known and highly regarded maple syrup producing states.

PS: My personal favorite is the New York Grade A Dark Amber!


Related Topics:
Waffles!
An Ode To Tabasco Sauce