Cheap breakfast cereal in Shanghai

We know -- yet another hard-hitting report from Shanghaiist. Sorry, but we need our cereal in the morning. And, as any cereal connoisseur in this city will tell you, it's not a cheap habit to maintain. We're not proud to admit it, but we once spent nearly US$10 for a box of Cinnamon Life at City Supermarket -- it was an impulse buy (and we justified it, as we always do with expensive purchases, using Blarney Stone logic ... Ten dollars? I've paid more than that for one-and-a-half Guinnesses at the Blarney Stone. It'd be stupid not to spend that much on an entire box of cereal, one that will feed me for several days).

Anyway, we thought some of you might want to know that we recently found relatively cheap legitimate breakfast cereal at the supermarket underneath the Westgate Mall (Mei Long Zhen, Nanjing Xi Lu and Jiangning Lu) -- and it's not the same Chinese Trix and Cheerios that have been available for 12.9 kuai per 150 gram box for a while now.

Yes, we found Cheerios, but also Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes (called "Frosties" here). The price? 6.9 kuai. Now, before you get too excited you should know that this very well may be just a special introductory price that could eventually go up. And, it's just for a 150 gram box. Cereal boxes in America range from 340 to 450 grams -- but even figuring that into the equation, we're talking RMB 15.7 to 20.7 for 340 to 450 grams of the new RMB 6.9 stuff. That's better than you'd get pretty much anywhere in Shanghai.

Now, if only they would stop bagging the cereal in those annoying individual serving packets -- we can figure out how much we want to fill our bowl with on our own, thank you very much.