Rant about Cheerios

I was at the store the other day and learned an interesting fun fact about Cheerios.  Everyone knows that there are different varieties of Cheerios, the two most popular being regular Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios.  The difference between these two cereals is pretty simple, they are exactly the same except that to make Honey Nut Cheerios, you take regular Cheerios and add a layer of sugar. 

To be clear, the only difference between the two is that Honey Nut Cheerios goes through an extra step at the manufacturing process to add an additional ingredient, sugar.  Using an extra ingredient and going through an extra step at manufacturing logically increases the cost of producing Honey Nut Cheerios...right?  So that would mean Honey Nut Cheerios should be more expensive at the store...right?

Wrong. 

For reasons passing understading, Honey Nut Cheerios are actually cheaper than regular Cheerios.  This is problematic for at least two reasons. 

First, regular Cheerios are significantly better for you because there is literally 11 times more sugar (11g vs. 1g) in Honey Nut Cheerios, this is practically a no brainer; 11 times more sugar = worse for you.  Yeah, everything (including sugar) in moderation is OK, but why does anyone need this extra sugar? 

Second, the only logical reason Honey Nut Cheerios are cheaper seems to be so that parents buy the cheaper cereal (which is clearly more expensive to produce) in hopes that their children will get addicted to the sugar content and eat more than they should, forcing the parents to buy more cereal, thus making up for the extra cost in increased volume of sales. 

The business strategy seems to be tricking parents into buying the cheaper product, then using sugar to encourage children to gorge themselves on sweetened cereal so their parents have to buy more.  Is it any wonder that there is a childhood obesity epidemic in this country?