Here is a thought that should bother you slightly.
The store brand cereal sitting next to the famous cereal may have come out of the same factory, on the same line, from the same recipe, on the same morning.
Different box. Different price. Sometimes a difference of forty percent.
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Not always. Sometimes the store version is genuinely worse. But often enough that the question deserves a real answer rather than a shrug.
And the deeper story here is not about cereal. It is about who actually holds the power in American retail, and how that power quietly shifted in the last twenty years.
This one changes how you walk through a grocery store.
Let us go.