Picture this: You are standing in the cereal aisle in your local grocery store, faced with the usual 100+ choices. Your kids swirl around you, excitedly telling you they want this one or that one. Do you get the Kellogg’s cornflakes or the generic? The General Mills Honey Nut Cheerios or the generic O’s version?

How do you decide? Not to mention, how do you ever get out of the store in one piece with so many choices in one food category, let alone the entire store? And how do you begin to teach your kids all that goes into your decision: price, taste, size, packaging, environmental considerations, moral scruples about corporate practices, which coupons you have, and so on? How can we help our kids understand that generics might prove to be a better alternative than the name brands seen in all the insistent TV commercials?