Each month NACS Magazine’s “In Context” column, authored by NACS Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Jeff Lenard, shares perspectives on some of the big picture issues facing our industry, and what NACS is doing to address those issues—both within the industry and to the larger audience of customers and potential customers. Jeff can be reached at jlenard@nacsonline.com or (703) 518-4272.

I eat cereal nearly every morning for breakfast. A few shakes of flakes, a cut-up banana and some milk and I’m on my way. I find it a very convenient breakfast. Plenty of others do as well, to the tune of $10 billion in sales every year.

Yet, cereal sales also have fallen about 30% over the past 15 years. The New York Times published an article in late February that looked at the reasons for the decline of the breakfast staple and one line, buried deep in the copy, became the bigger news story: “Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.”

Let that sink in. Washing—or just rinsing—a bowl and a spoon is considered too much work by nearly half of all millennials.

Okay, the natural tendency now is to throw up your hands in exasperation and say, “Kids today are lazy— we’re doomed!” Resist that temptation. After all, remember what our parents’ generation said about us. (They walked five miles to school and both ways were uphill.)

Instead, focus on what millennials are really saying. They are saying that they want convenience, and eating something that requires even minimal clean-up isn’t convenient enough. They want even more convenience.

The same point was essentially echoed at the recent NACS Leadership Forum, held February in Miami. Harvard Business School Professor and Stanley Roth Fellow Dr. Rajiv Lal told attendees that convenience is the hottest currency in retail today.

Dr. Lal is not alone in his thinking. “Convenience is the one thing that’s really changing trends these days,” Euromonitor’s Howard Telford told The Washington Post.

With millennials more interested in convenience and less interested in eating at home, they are picking up more grab-and-go convenience items for breakfast, such as yogurt, fruit cups, breakfast bars and breakfast sandwiches. And the only place that sells these all of these items—conveniently—is a convenience store. All of a sudden, the kids are alright.

We see these trends as opportunities. The 2015 NACS report, “Health & Wellness Trends and Strategies for the Convenience Store Sector,” developed by the Hudson Institute, recommends that convenience store operators should look beyond simply meeting the needs of their traditional customers and embrace these growing customer segments that are demanding more better-for-you items that can be conveniently purchased.

“Convenience stores have an opportunity to own convenient foodservice—especially breakfast—when nutrition is considered most important,” said report coauthor Hank Cardello. (The report is available under the resources tab at nacsonline.com/refresh and summarized in the October 2015 NACS Magazine cover story.)

Cereal, whether enjoyed for breakfast or dinner, is not going away anytime soon. That’s also good news for convenience stores because we sell the milk and bananas that go along with it. La Crosse, Wisconsin-based Kwik Trip alone sells about a half a million bananas a day.

So while your initial reaction to millennials admitting that they don’t want to clean up after themselves may have made you bananas, their embrace of convenience can make you bread.