They almost always get good ratings in Consumers.
Amen to that. My dad (cheapskate that he is) bought a pack in 1985, and I think I still have splinters from it.
More power to you. I worked for a while at a pharmaceutical plant that manufactured generic OTC drugs, cosmetics, and vitamin supplements. The formulations of active ingredients are identical to those of the name brands. The quality standards are identical too, if not stricter, because the market for generics is expanding and every manufacturer wants to impress new clients. The only time I’ll buy name brand stuff from a pharmacy is if a sale drops the price below that of the generic.
John Wayne TP, it don’t take no crap off anybody!
I was in the grocery the other day and saw a woman that looked like she was on the pampered side, her conversation with her friend seemed to solidify that. I’m standing in line, waiting my turn and look at the items she is buying. Everything was the name brand, the ice cream, veggies, etc.
The lone cheapie item on her conveyer? Toilet Paper. EGADS! If I buy nothing name brand at ALL the ONE thing I will absolutely say “Yep, worth $50 a roll.” is quality toilet paper. I may live under a bridge and beg for coins but those coins would go for good TP.
My husband is a brand snob and he tries like hell to be able to tell a difference between some things and most times, he is wrong in the other direction.
She is either wrapping breakables for storage, or stocking the guest bathroom.
I shop at Winco for most of my groceries. They sell bulk items, legumes, spices, flour, sugar, nuts, etc., etc. Tremendous price difference compared w/ prepackaged items. They have “Snack Crackers” comparable to “Ritz” at half the price. Many other examples. In almost all cases, the nutritional values are identical and there is little, if any, difference in taste. I actually prefer the taste of some store brand canned foods.
In which case, double EEK! I thought you were supposed to cater to guests, not torture their genitals. Of course, I’m not much for entertaining, so maybe I’m missing out on watching my guests squirm.
Of all the diaper brands out there, we find these to be best. And they are cheaper than the “brand” names as well.
When your kid shits as much as mine, you need both cheap, and good. >:D
Probably about as many ways as there are to can green beans. The trick with generic meds is that while the drug may be the identical molecule, there can be differences in the fillers, binders and such that are lumped together as “inert ingredients.” Shouldn’t make a difference, but now and then it does, and to the point that there are some meds that your health insurance may pay for the brand name at the generic rate. Mine, for example, prefers to dispense actual brand name Levoxyl instead of the gereric levothyroxine while still charging me the generic rate. If I show up with a prescription for Synthroid, I will either get generic levothyroxine, or pay the brand-name rate.
Does this mean generic levothyroxine is bad? I doubt it. But, it does seem to suggest that they’ve found Levoxyl to be better in the long run in some way or another that justifies the cost difference.
Back to generic grocery store brands…
Years and years ago, I remember the generic aisle at Jewel, and how everything was in a white container with a thin black stripe over a broader Army green stripe, and heavy “stencil” lettering. Apparently they wanted the stuff to look like military surplus. The silly item of the whole line was the shampoo. **GREEN SHAMPOO. ** Well, yeah, just look at the bottle and you could tell it was green. Nothing else had an adjective - it was all CORN and **DISHWASHER DETERGENT ** and BAKING SODA, but for some reason, they wanted us to be sure that we knew the green shampoo was green.
When I was a young’un (Sprite and 7-Up were sold exclusively in glass bottles), my aunt (whom I trust very much) recounted to me that the Coca-Cola distributor informed her that the Sprite and 7-Up bottles rolled right through the same fillers with all of the same syrups. Of course this would only have applied to this particular Coca-Cola bottling facility; Sprite is a Coke product; and 7-Up always needed to scrounge around for local bottlers, who in this case was this particular Coca-Cola bottler.
Spite/7-Up/Lemon-Lime was always one of those generic drinks that tasted absolutely the same to me, unlike Coke/Like/Pepsi/RC, at least until Slice came around.
I did too, until I was turned onto www.1800diapers.com Slightly cheaper and they deliver it right to my door. And they have Kirkland brand wipes, which are the best wipes ever (they don’t have Kirkland diapers, though - but neither does my Costco, oddly enough. They only stock Huggies and Pampers.)
I did some more thinking, and realized that they aren’t the Kirkland’s best products we buy, but rather the Berkley & Jensen from BJs. Everything else stands though.
The wife prefers Pampers brand wipes, so as an obedient husband, I get those.
When I was in college, I worked in a potato chip factory.
We produced chips that were sold under at least 5 brand names. Our name brand, a ‘cheaper’ brand name that we owned, and 3 store brand names.
They all came off the same production line, with the same raw potatoes, cooking oil, and salt used. So they were basically the same chips.
Except … we took some steps to try to keep our name brand the highest quality ones.
- the machines bagging our name brand chips were at the front of the line, the store brands were bagged at the end of the line (where they would get more broken chips).
- the store brand machines at the end of the line were started up first in the morning, so that any underdone or overdone chips (due to the fryer temp not being adjusted yet) tended to be in store brand bags.
- when the raw potatoes are of poorer quality, we would tend to bag the chips in store brand bags, and wait till we had better potatoes to produce our name brand chips. (But we couldn’t run out, so if stocks got low, we would have to produce our name brand chips even if the potatoes weren’t the best.)
So the end result was that much of the time the store brand was the same as our name brand, often just slightly lower quality, and only occasionally was it of noticeably lower quality.
Store brand frozen vegetables (especially mixes) always seem inferior to name brand. On the other hand Safeway store brand ice cream is superior to the name brands. Their microwave popcorn, on the other hand, is dreadful.
One thing about store brands, is that they can switch suppliers without customers knowing, but they can also lose control of the product flow. (At least a while ago.) One summer I worked in a jewelry warehouse on Fifth Avenue. Our biggest customer was Sears, who bought our stuff for their store brand jewelry. It turns out they thought that we made the jewelry, while we just repackaged stuff from other suppliers. They hired the son of a Sears VP for the summer also, and we had to make sure he never found out we didn’t make the stuff - it turned out to be no big problem.
This thread already did that for you. 
I don’t mind buying generics for parity items like vegetable oil, butter, flour, sugar and the sort of staples where it really doesn’t matter. Unless you’re getting into specialty items, how many ways are there to make noodles?
OTOH, some things aren’t the same. I don’t buy generic soda that often, and there are some kinds of prepared foods whose generics just suck.
Robin
Wo0w. Thank you. I think. 
Years ago every supermarket had a cheap house brand - No Frills, Black and Gold, Homebrand etc; all packaged in a deliberately unattractive manner. The reason for this was pretty clever, they wanted to offer something for the less well off or thriftiest shoppers but didn’t want it to be so attractive as to lure the premium buyer away from their favourite brand.
Some time in the recent past they seem to have decided to compete at the top end. Woolworths have a house brand Select that offers some top quaality products that aren’t available from other manufacturers. The products are often displayed in the premium shelf locations usually reserved for favoured brands.
A quick search found this interesting article that confirms my thought that this is a recent trend.
From the trade website of the Private Label Manufacturing Association:
You can search the PLMA website for more marketing statistics and trends, but I couldn’t find any sort of info on who specifically makes what for who. Them’s the trade secrets I suppose, and part of the whole market game. It is an established model in Europe, though, with Britain’s Tesco, and Germany’s Aldi supermarkets, honed down to a no frills store, with store brands only. Any European folks care to weigh in?
Aldi is here in the South, and, muy cheap. Most of the stuff isn’t what I eat, but for products like pasta, salsa, cheese, some frozen vegetables; I’ve found them as good as the highly advertised labels.
No, Tesco, although having a wide range of “own brand” things, does have the bigger name brand thing too. Funny thing is I really had to stop and think about that one, being an impecunious purchaser of cheap stuff. 
I really had to stop and fetch up a mental picture of the shelves. Wow, I had not realised just how cheap I am, in a manner of speaking. I think you are right about Aldi, though, and LIDL (another German store also operating in the U.K. and seemingly half-a-dozen other places to judge by the number of languages on the packaging) also sticks to its own brands.