Word: cereals
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...onetime colleague and lover Mike Sager. Cooke says that as a child she learned to lie as a way of avoiding her strict father's temper. Unfortunately, liars who indulge their vice publicly and get caught don't have many career options. "I'm in a situation where cereal has become a viable dinner choice," says Cooke, who is divorced and works part time at a department store in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for $6.15 an hour. She's talking now, says Sager, to "retrieve her name from the files of infamy," and to rev up her failed writing career. "What...
Price competition is an alien concept to the handful of firms that dominate the cereal industry. "Their rivalry is more akin to the choreographed grunts of televised wrestling than a cutthroat duel to the death," says John Connor, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. "The ultimate weapon, steep price cuts, is rarely used." That has kept profit margins high. Ronald Cotterill, director of the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Connecticut, estimates that cereal firms pocket an average of 17% of their sales as operating income, vs. 7% to 8% for the food industry...
...cereal makers insist that their products are a bargain, particularly with discount coupons. Even without them, the industry estimates that the average cost of a bowl of cereal, including milk, is about 35'. Yet shoppers who watch their families gobble up a $5 box of cereal in a couple of sittings still consider the cost to be considerable. Ann Rhodes, a mother with three children at home in Waterford Township, Michigan, says of her family, which can shred seven boxes of cereal weekly, "The 14-year-old will eat a whole box if you let him, and the 11-year...
Clearly, Post scored a public relations coup. "Every statistic, every survey we took only showed that our customers were becoming more and more dissatisfied," says Mark Leckie, general manager of Post cereals. "You can see them walking down cereal aisles, clutching fistfuls of coupons and looking all over the shelves, trying to match them with a specific brand...
...blame on the cereal makers. After all, they're out to make money for their shareholders, and by that measure, they've been quite successful. Kellogg has generated a 19% annual return to shareholders between 1985 and 1995, making it a far better investment than, say, Exxon or IBM. And despite the staggering price rises, only recently have consumers started to change their behavior and buy something else. As he pondered Post's move, one rival industry executive put it this way, "People are predisposed to buy the cereals they prefer. Why should we do anything...