Cereality Check

I can't say I was surprised when I walked into Cereality, Penn's newest food spot, at 1 p.m. on Wednesday and saw the line almost out the door. I had barely gotten a glimpse of all the bells and whistles the place had to offer -- the shiny "moo machines," which bear a striking resemblance to the milk dispensers of the dining halls, the pajama-clad counter staff, the flatscreen TV in the corner -- before a smiling man in a suit cornered me.

It was nice, really. He pretty much read the menu to me, which was good since I probably wouldn't have been able to concentrate on it myself with all the thumping Muzak in the background and Tony the Tiger prancing around. I could get cereal in three ways: Their Way (after all, they're the experts), My Way (how empowering!), or A Whole New Way (a veritable cereal revolution!). After the Smiley Cereal Man finished his spiel, I took another look around at the Penn kids shoveling spoonfuls of Lucky Charms/Cocoa Puffs hybrids into their mouths from those Chinese takeout-esque containers and got the hell outta there.

Now, of course my first instinct is to pull the Fuck Corporations Card. I could easily clamor on about how typical it is for Penn (maybe we should start calling it Penn, Inc.) to allow such an overpriced, overhyped business to come to campus. Figures, I could say, that it's nestled directly next-door to Smith Bros. and across the street from Huntsman Hall. After all, the concept of Cereality sounds like a Management 100 project conceived in the depths of 1920 Commons.

But, there's more to it than that. I can't just cry every time someone comes up with a clever business idea. God forbid someone makes a buck, right? Well, the fault doesn't automatically lie with the business. Or with Penn, for that matter. After all, David Roth, co-founder of Cereality, was pretty upfront with his goal for the company when he said, "The idea is to become Starbucks for cereal." No secret there: He wants to take a common product, make it trendy, add a few hundred percent markup and whore it out.

At least he's being honest about it. And it looks like it's working for him. Like I said, the line was almost out the door yesterday afternoon. His store in Arizona has done well, and he's got another on the way in Chicago. Maybe this really is a Cereal Revolution.

Or, maybe we need to stop and think before we spend three bucks on a bowl of Pop Rocks-covered Cap'n Crunch. Why did Cereality choose Penn as location No. 2 out of all the universities in the country? Do we have a reputation that screams, "Our wallets are open! And we like cereal! And we're too damn lazy to pour a bowl ourselves!" What's next, a place that microwaves your own Easy Mac? Or, that hocks peanut butter and jelly made "your way"? I like PB&J; as much as the next guy, no, probably more than the next guy, but that doesn't mean I need someone to cut the crusts off for me for $5.

Although Cereality has professed its goal of Starbucks-level success, that doesn't put the company completely in the clear. A friend pointed out to me that there's a difference between what Starbucks has done and what Cereality is trying to do. Starbucks took the concept of the local coffee shop and corporatized it. Lots of other businesses have done the same thing. Just look at what Home Depot has done to the local hardware store, or what Wal-Mart has done to the Mom & Pop corner store.

The difference here is that Cereality wants to corporatize something that's already corporate: the cereal industry. Even if you go buy a box of cereal at a grocery store, it's expensive -- between $4 and $5 if it's not on sale. The markup is already huge. And Cereality is capitalizing on top of that. Obviously, this teeny restaurant won't become Starbucks overnight. But we have to realize that every cute little bucket of goodness we buy shows that this is what we want.

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