It’s 1 a.m. and you’ve just spent the night studying, cramming all that information into your brain for your final tomorrow. You’re putting your books away and getting ready to sleep, and then you remember that you still need to pack your lunch for tomorrow. Great. You open your pantry and see a box of crackers, cereal, etc., as well as granola bars, those pre-packaged 100 calories snacks, etc. Being the tired person you are, you grab those individually wrapped snacks. But why! Because you are tired and do not want to put in the effort to put crackers into a container. But still!
Take the snack Goldfishes for example. It’s the “snack that smiles 
back Goldfish”. In the snacks aisle at a grocery store, you have the jumbo 3-pack box, or you can opt to buy the box of pre-packaged Goldfishes. And if you look at the price, you will see that the box of pre-packaged Goldfishes have a higher price tag, and you are getting less compared to the jumbo 3-pack box! So why might you decide to pay this higher price when you know you are not getting your money’s worth? For convenience sake. Instead of dedicating time in your busy schedule to pack the Goldfishes into a container, you know it will save time by just grabbing the pre-packaged Goldfishes. The higher the price, the higher the convenience; the lower the price, the lower the convenience.
The colloquially called snack food industry takes advantage of the fact that some people are willing to pay a higher price for convenience. Individually wrapped snacks are such a common commodity now. There wasn’t much selection of these snacks back when I was in elementary school, but there are so many choices available now. Even for someone like me, who tries to avoid individually wrapped snacks because it is uneconomical, I find it hard staying away from it. All I can say is, pre-packaged foods have successfully targeted students in need of convenience.