For most of your list this is true. For a lot of things, like making a roux or breading chicken, generic flour is fine. But if you are baking there is absolutely a difference in flours. Gluten content, grind and hardness can all make an extreme difference in the final product.
Alas! No Koops in Thailand.
And parachutes. Even hookers, judging from the number of legendary ones who have a regular clientele over here.
It IS coarser. I found this out years ago. Store brand is fine for my coffee and baking but if I’m rolling or sprinkling a cookie I want a better brand with a finer texture.The store brand always has chunks too. Big fat hard chunks. This is the Kroger store brand.
I’ve often found that store-brand or other cheap-ass brands of canned fruits and vegetables are noticeably lower quality. They tend of have irregularly shaped and sized pieces, often aren’t quite ripe (or whatever else it takes to make them chewable) and often stemmy. The major brands are consistently much better.
If you want cheap on tires, just go to any junk yard and ask them for tires with your same rims and buy them for $ 10.00 installed.
How many bug parts per million do you find ideal?
Probably not. 6 days of rental is the price of a high quality tool. I bought a lot of used rental tools during the time i was in business.
You may have gotten (somehow) the type of sugar used to sprinkle over cookies or cakes for effect… I don’t know the specific name for it…
Then there’s low-price tuna…
In Russia, tuna eat you!
Store brands are a mixed bag. Some are excellent, some lousy. Some are fine, just different from the national brand. Here is an example- I like Miracle Whip for certain uses a few times a year. I don’t like its price, so I always buy the cheapest store brand. I recently bought some of the cheapest type at a Marsh supermarket. It did not taste much like Miracle Whip, as I was expecting. It tasted much better, in a less sweet, spicier kind of way.
Anyway, I still hold to the idea that enough store brand items are just as good or better than the name brands to make trying them once to find out a good gamble.
If you’re in a wine-growing region of France, chances are the carafe wine - the cheapest wine - in the local hotels and restaurants will be the local wine, the excess the vintners cannot sell under their own labels, and as such it’s often very good.
In the U.K. for both food and drink a supermarket store’s own premier brand is often pretty good, because they have their name riding on it.
Basic office supplies like staples, paper clips, rubber bands, pencils, etc. work pretty well even if they are the cheapest. But with more complicated things like pens, staplers, hole punches, etc., the cheapest ones may be shoddy and practically unusable.
Concur with the sugar differences: the upper midwest gets a lot of beet sugar, and it has a higher mineral content which can make sweet pickle brine turbid and jellies less clear. And with flour, if I make bread, it needs to be King Arthur, but it usually goes bad by the next time I make it.
Gas–we don’t have any “Gas for Less” sort of stations in our town, but I notice a mileage difference among brands.
Pencils–I worked at a place which bought the cheapest, and about one out of three was either warped, or the lead was not centered.
I often buy the store brand cereal because it can easily be $2 cheaper than name brand. I really like the “Everyday Essentials” frosted mini-wheats just as well as the genuine Frosted Mini-Wheats.
Condoms, meh, saran wrap and a rubber band… now that’s cheap.
Socks, definitely not, I can’t stand cheap socks.
Tricks, cheap tricks are OK, sometimes.
Yeah, but their rice has, like, only half the arsenic. 
This. Yesterday, I stopped at the grocery store specifically to take advantage of a sale on cereal: Malt-o-Meal brand for $1.00 a box. The quality difference between MoM and their big brand counterparts is minimal, in my experience (and there are a couple of MoM varieties I prefer to the originals,) and the cost was about 20-25% of the name brands. With five kids in the house, that kind of savings is important! (Why yes, I do have 15 unopened boxes of cereal in the pantry. That’s totally not weird, right?)
As for sugar, I had no clue, really, that so many places in the US commonly sell beet sugar versus cane. Here in the deep south, cane is the default - I don’t even know where I’d look to find beet sugar!
And no, all flours are not created equal. For everyday bread making, I generally use fairly inexpensive brands, or even store brand AP flour, but if I’m doing any fancy baking with yeast, I pay more for a good bread flour with a consistent gluten level. And for biscuits or other quick rise breads, it’s White Lily all the way - it’s a lower-protein flour, and makes a noticeably lighter biscuit. (And I frequently substitute White Lily for cake flour - WL goes on sale often enough that I usually have a good supply for $.40/pound or less, while cake flour almost never goes on sale, and costs more than twice as much, and the difference in the final product is almost imperceptible.)
Unless you have pretty meticulous records to this effect, I’d call baloney on it. Gas is gas… with the sole common exception being the amount of ethanol blended in, which will lower the mileage proportionately.
But most such claims are anecdotal and based on subjective memories and varying driving over varying parts of the year. Just sayin’.
(ETA: the other less-common exception is fueling a vehicle that will adapt to higher octane gas. Put in premium, and the engine will develop a bit more horsepower and get better mileage due to timing and other adaptations. Put in regular, and it backs off, losing power and mileage.)
I swear by the 99 cent store cleansers. Bon Ami hasn’t advertised in decades, but it still moves product and works wonderfully.
Ghost Detection devices.