It’s a matter for some debate whether the continued existence of single-serving packages of Velveeta is good or bad in general for humanity. America narrowly avoided last year’s threatened Velveeta shortage, and its manufacturer Kraft considered taking the smallest packages of their processed cheese product off the market. Then they looked more closely at their sales numbers and noticed something interesting.

While the small boxes weren’t big sellers in grocery stores, they were very popular in dollar stores and dollar-ish stores like Family Dollar and Dollar General. Lots of people are shifting some of their food spending to dollar stores as middle-class consumers scale down their shopping.

Smaller households are one factor that’s sending people to dollar stores, too. General Mills has noticed that baby boomers who are shopping for households or only one or two people are shopping at dollar stores, too: not necessarily because they’re being frugal, but because they like to buy things in mini quantities. That includes items like Velveeta cheese-like products, sure, but also snack bars like Fiber One and cereals.

Velveeta revives as young and poor shop dollar stores for groceries [Reuters]

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