My favorite was the generic greeting card. Inside it said “Whatever.”
Store brands were around long before the generic craze. In the last 15 years, it’s been my perception that many of them have taken great pains to be of higher quality than the “name brands.” This trend seems to have been pioneered by President’s Choice, which I believe originally came from Canada’s Loblaw chain, but which was sold at the various American Stores like Jewel, Acme, and Lucky.
There’s a scene in the original “Repo Man” where Otto, the punk rocker played by Emilio Estevez, is eating out of a can labeled “food”. 
Yes, store brands were around well before the white label generics, but the generic stuff was cheaper than the store brands. I remember that the quality of the generic stuff was lousy compared to the store brands, considering the cost difference wasn’t that much. However, my experience is pretty much from the beer, cigarettes, and boxed macaroni and cheese. Yes, I was in college then…
No, and NO!
Store brands existed in the mid-late 60’s (the time frame I remember, born 1960).
I specifically remember National canned vegetables, Kohls Foods store brands and Red Owl in the late 60’s/early 70’s.
Generics didn’t come around until the recession era of the mid-late 70’s. They were “campy” for a while even though they sucked shit through a straw. After the recession ended the generics went away but store brands were still around, as they were before generics came to be!
There was a Libby canning factory outside of the small city where I grew up and one of the the home ech teachers husbands worked there. She told the girls in her class to tell their moms about how the garbage and slop on the floor ended up in the generic cans. This wasn’t an “urban legend”, her husband really did work there.
Also, it’s been my experience that house brands are better quality than the old generics, in many products nearly as good as the brand names if not as good. Most of the generic stuff was cheap because it was lousy.
When shopping at Costco, it’s pretty transparent that the “store brand” (Kirkland) is in fact the relabeled “premium” product. For example, the “triple distilled French vodka” is sold right next to Grey Goose, which is…triple distilled French vodka. In other cases there isn’t even a real distinction: the 3lb bags of Kettle Chips also bear a Kirkland logo, though I believe that these large bags are only sold at Costco.
I would also add that store brands/off brands are not all created equal. IME off brand plastic wrap and plastic baggies are BAD, as are some store brand canned veg and soup. It is all part of a boring but sadly necessary process of discovery for the middle class.
Everything in the grocery and liquor stores is generic, including the six-pack of “Drink”.
Costco doesn’t manufacture “Kirkland”, it’s all contracted out. The only specification is that it at least match (or exceed) the best name brand product on the market.
There’s also the co-branded products like the Kettle Chips you noted.
This. Generics were a direct response to a steep recession that crashed a lot of people’s finances. Middle class folks who would never have been caught dead using store coupons were suddenly avid clippers. Anything and everything to save a buck became the mantra.
And as other have said, generics quickly raced to the bottom of both cost & quality. As the economy warmed up, many consumers switched up to the next cheapest thing, store brands. And with the stagnation in middle class wages since, that’s where a lot of them have stayed. And that’s how they raised their kids who are now 20-something shoppers.
Weren’t there also T-shirts you could buy embzoned with MAN, WOMAN, STUDENT, or other similar categorizations?
I remember back when it used to be yellow on blue. And the packaging really was nothing more than text on a solid background; nowadays many of the packages have fancier designs or photos of the product.
The BuzzFeed commentary is for the most part amusing, but in #21 they’re only displaying their own culinary ignorance. “Peaches and cream” is the name of a popular variety of sweetcorn, one of many which is commonly cultivated and sold fresh as such around Lake Ontario. It’s unthinkable that any shopper there would think the can contained “corn that allegedly tastes like peaches and cream” (unless perhaps they’d never in their lives perused the fresh produce section).
Yes, store brands existed before the black-and-white generics did. There were differences between store brands then and now - store brands then often had names that were more obviously store brands- (think Target brand diapers rather than “up and up” or Target brand cookies rather than Archer Farms or Market Pantry) and the products were more basic and there was less variety ( for example, I don’t recall any store brand frozen dinners or diapers in in the 70’s)
It’s easy to forget how expensive some things we take for granted were in the 80s. $6-8 for a single floppy disk. $8 or so for one blank video tape. At a time when my rent was less than $150 a month. Custom printing was far more expensive than it is now. I bought a lot of generic groceries to save money, and the guys in the band I played with called me “Generic Doug”. As a joke, I got a plain white t-shirt and had “BASS PLAYER” printed on it in black letters. The lettering more than tripled the cost of the shirt. Anything with other colors cost far more than I could afford at the time.
Yep. And what people who weren’t around then don’t realize, the recession of the late 70’s was actually worse than what happened in 2009. It didn’t just bring unemployment, it brought massive inflation. A can of soup that was 19 cents on Monday would go up to 23 cents the next week, and then to 28 cents 2 weeks later. So not only were folks broke with no income, whatever money they did have became worth less and less in a very short period of time.
Americans haven’t seen that kind of inflation since and are rather ignorant of it.
In the spring of '79, my parents, along with my uncle and aunt, broke ground on a True Value hardware store in suburban Green Bay; the store opened in October of that year. In the months between the groundbreaking and the opening, the interest rate on the business loan they’d taken out from a local bank doubled.
Combined with the fact that the area where we built the store was full of blue-collar workers at the local paper mills, who suffered huge layoffs during that time, and the store was doomed from the start.
I forgot to mention the extremely high interest rates. On top of unemployment and inflation they killed people who wanted to buy a house, car, or borrow money for other reasons.
Had it not been for those factors generics would never have appeared. Their quality was sub-par to already budget priced store brands whose quality was sub-par to name brand products.
Most of us buy branded items because we have become comfortable with them; we are used to them and we don’t want to take a chance on an unknown. I have been disappointed by generics on many occasions, though lots of them are fine.
I have to say store brands seem to be better than they have been in the past- but maybe I’m swayed by the packaging, which is much better than it used to be.
Buying brands is a buffer against ignorance (although often not cost justified). I heard of a study where they looked at purchasing of an item (over the counter medication) between similarly educated professions, looking at doctors and lawyers. Doctors were comfortable buying generics (as they are knowledgeable about medicines), whereas lawyers buy brand names (as their expertise is not generally helpful in making this purchase).
Wow, that’s a blast from the past! I remember those.
In those days, the word “generic” became an insult, at least among us kids (“That’s generic!”).