From the thread Favorite fake product names? I wondered if there are any generic products still being sold in the United States or around the world. I don’t mean private label products, which have some branding even if it’s not widely recognized.
From 1986. Already on their way out.
From 2014
But I think store-branded products are just the way generics are sold now. If I buy a grocery product and the only branding on it is “Kroger” or “Private Selection” to my mind that’s a generic.
Where I see a distinction is with products that are very obviously precisely identical to some branded product, produced by the same manufacturer but with the store branding. I’m not sure what you’d call them, they are not really generics.
I don’t think there are any generic products left, not in the way there was in the early 1980s. At that time, there would be products labeled very simply in black ink on white. So instead of Gold Medal flour, there would be a bag labeled “ALL PURPOSE FLOUR”. I get the impression that private label goods have taken the place of the generics.
I agree that private labels have replaced the ‘true’ generics. I was born in '83 and don’t have any memory of an unbranded product. Sure, “guaranteed value” or “no name” aren’t ‘name brands,’ but they sure are brands and not generics.
If I remember correctly, back in the days of true generics, stores would carry both store-brand and generic products. They were two different things.
In my experience, items branded “Kroger” (or some other store brand or private label) are often equivalent in quality with name-brand items; and, even when they’re not, they’re at least consistent with themselves: if I’ve bought that particular Kroger product before, I know what to expect. With true generics, I wouldn’t have either of these expectations, unless it were a product so basic that I wouldn’t expect any variation from one brand to another.
At the consumer level, I don’t know of any products that don’t have branding no matter how basic. There are industrial products (metal alloys which meet a specification, etc.) that are not branded. What unbranded consumer products are you thinking of?
I’m thinking of the generic products of the early 80s. which seem not to exist anywhere any more—hence the thread title. But I definitely remember product labels like those in the bottom row here:
What about the bulk sections that exist in many supermarkets? They sell unlabeled products like flour, rice, granola, chocolate chips, etc.
I remember those truly generic products from the '80s. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that at the grocery stores here in the Chicago area in at least a decade, and likely longer.
Man, that brings back memories. I haven’t seen those since … probably the 80s.
Here’s a website that gives others an idea of what they looked like:
That blog post says they were gone by 1988.
As recently as 2016, Walmart was selling generic sodas in 2-liter and 12-packs. They were cheaper even than the Sam’s Choice store brand and were just labeled “Cola”, “Diet Cola”, “Orange”, “Grape”, etc.
I bought a case of the “Cola” once as a lark and I found it utterly undrinkable. I don’t go to Walmart much these days, so I don’t know if they still carry it or not.
Lot of food products - fruit, vegetables, etc - are sold unbranded. When I go to the supermarket to buy broccoli I expect to see a big bin of unbranded broccoli from which I will select what I want and add it to my basket. Most supermarkets would have scores of product lines which are sold on that basis. And some produce is usually branded in supermarkets but usually not in specialist shops - meat, for instance.
Same goes for hardware and home repair supplies. While a lot of stuff comes in silly blister packs with (irrelevant) brand names on them, a lot of stuff is still sold loose - you just buy the number/weight/length/other quantity of whatever it is you want, and it’s unbranded. The hammer is branded, the nails may or many not be branded, and the timber is typically not branded.
Good point–many fruits, vegetables and bulk foods are unbranded.
At the hardware store I go to, even the loose bolts, washers and nuts where you pick what you need and write the part number/quantity on the bag are in a branded cabinet. If you need a larger quantity and go for the box, it would also be branded. By the time I’m buying the 2 x 4, it’s no longer branded, but when I see it go by on a freight train it’s usually wrapped in branded water resistant material.
Yes, many goods, like produce, are sold unbranded but that’s different from the generic goods of the 1980s, where the generic labeling was the branding.
I started working in grocery stores in the mid 80s and I’d been paying attention when we were in the store for at least a decade before that. I don’t remember ever seeing a genuine generic label product outside of a TV show or movie in Texas.
But I can remember many store brands that were good, and after a while I understood why the weird packaging I saw on the idiotbox didn’t really exist for too long. If you’re making a decent product, but don’t want to go through the promotion and branding process, why not adjust it to the retailer’s requirements, and let them sell it as their own product? The house brands of most places are generally as good as or possibly better than the national brands (cough, cough…HEB).
Mmm, you don’t see Winn-Dixie too often anymore, but Dr, Chek was a pretty good Dr. Pepper imitation. Even, then, not a generic. What would it be labeled? Weirdly fruity tasting cola?
Much of this conversation is confusing to me, because we have not clarified the distinction (if any) between “house brand” and “generic”. To me, a true generic is like the nuts or candies that I scoop into a bag, and which have no branding at all. In contrast, the plain black and white boxes that this thread talks about are easily identifiable: Despite the lack of a brand name, the box of No-Name Cornflakes at Winn-Dixie looked totally different from the No-Name Cornflakes at Piggly Wiggly. Different shape, different font, different ingredients. After a while, I could look at a package and know which store it came from.
This does NOT mean that the stores stopped making house brands. Rather, alongside the house brand Shop-Rite Cornflakes were boxes of No-Frills Cornflakes which were even cheaper than the house brand, and not necessarily lower quality. (And if I’m not mistaken, “No-Frills” was exactly the name Shop-Rite chose for this purpose.)
Even “No-Frills Cornflakes” is a brand; it’s the No-Frills brand.
Generic widgets would be sold simply as “widgets”. They might be unlabelled, or they might be labelled simply as “widgets”, or the labelling might have other information like nutritional content, place of origin, etc.
The true black and white (or black on yellow around the midwest) died out about the mid-to-late 1980’s – because they didn’t sell (or not enough).
Grocery stores are a vicious battle for shelf space. Any product that doesn’t sell gets replaced by another item that sells more. And much faster now, with computers &barcodes giving near-instant info to store managers.
Plus customers have a real tendency to ‘go for the middle’ on purchases. So given a choice between the name brand (expensive), store brand (cheaper), and ‘generic’ (cheapest), many customers ended up with the store brand. The ‘generic’ wasn’t that much cheaper compared to the store brand. So it didn’t sell enough, and store managers dumped it. Soon the whole ‘generic’ category mostly died out.
Definitely an 80s thing.
We called it “plain wrap” in my area. There was a Punk Band called Plain Wrap, their album cover looked like these.
I think the marketing idea behind it was, “Look hears a perfectly good can of corn, we save money not advertising or fancy packaging and pass the savings on to you.”
But people saw it as more as cheap corn=lower quality corn. Plus i think a stigma got attached to it as poor people food. You wouldnt want to show up at lunch in high school with any of these products.
I agree with others that the store brand is the same as generic. In fact the same corn canning factory probably kept making canned corn for the store, just with a different label.