That’s all true, and I actually agree with you, except that for AP flour, cheapest usually is imperceptible from the best brands I find.
I’d guess that 90% or more of the people buying flour in the country are buying bog-standard AP flour, and consider it fungible. This may be due to uses that don’t depend on gluten such as thickening things like gravy or soups, or baking cookies, or making play-dough, or any number of other uses. A large proportion of them likely find that it makes perfectly adequate biscuits and bread, even if White Lily and King Arthur make the best biscuit and bread flours out there. That’s actually me speaking from personal experience; we have a bunch of KA flours, and a bunch of artisanal-type flours from what I’m convinced is another cult near Waco, but we still mow through the AP flour at something like a 4:1 ratio, so we buy it by the 25 lb sack of “Bakers and Chefs H&R AP Flour” from Sam’s Club, and it’s no better or worse than say… Gold Medal AP or KA AP flour.
Fresh flowers bought from a Florist stay nice for almost a week. When you buy from the guy who sells them at the intersection they are they ones that the florist is throwing away because they are already turning. I realize that that isn’t what you said, but something people should know about flowers.
I had always assumed that flour is flour, but I have a friend who just took over a restaurant here in the Dominican Republic and he tells me that local flour brands don’t last for more than a week before going bad. Says he cannot even make pancakes out of it.
In supermarkets and convenience stores, there’s usually a cheaper milk brand in addition to the more expensive major brand. Back when I was a convenience-store clerk right out of high school in West Texas, the milk deliveryman assured me the cheaper label contained the very same milk from the factory. They just slapped a different label on the jug and sold it for less. Now I’m asking the Board if that’s really true.
Quite a few years (15 roughly) ago there was a class action lawsuit against an unnamed big name gasoline retailer for their fuel causing a lot of engine problems. I won’t name the company but it starts with S and ends with Hell.
No, I actually have experience in sugar refineries. The private label products–store brands-are run exactly the same time as the national label brands. As in, the line stops and packaging changes, but the product is the same. Really. As far as different granulations for white sugar, yes those certainly exist, for example confectioners sugar. But the real fact is that when you buy granulated sugar from your local grocery store the dfference between Domino and the store brand name is likely not a damned thing.
As a kid, we went on a field-trip to the old Imperial Sugar mill in Sugarland (we lived in the next town to the east), and I distinctly remember going through the packaging center and seeing the uncut bags come out of the ceiling in clear tubes. There were 2-3 grocery store brands I recognized, 2-3 I didn’t, Imperial Sugar, and another one or two name brands I didn’t recognize. We were told that they were doing brown sugar that day, so the implicit assumption was that it was the exact same thing in all the various bags. I believe it; their sugarmaking process wasn’t quite sophisticated enough to make multiple grades of the same basic product- they made multiple sizes of granulated white sugar, molasses, and a couple different grades of brown sugar (light and dark).
In my experience, the funky different sized stuff is from Mexico, not US sugar mills. At least that’s the way the sugar at the Sam’s Club near me works- the US stuff is Imperial Sugar and is a fairly fine grade, while the “Daily Chef” house brand is from Mexico and is noticeably larger grained, and noticeably less consistent, like they just ran it through one sieve instead of a couple.
Just back from St Martin, where, on the French side, a bottle of incredible French wine was €18 while a bottle of average Californian wine was €33. Buying the cheap stuff worked well.
That reminds me of Budweiser beer, which due to import taxes commands a premium price here in Thailand, as opposed to the much cheaper yet excellent local brew Singha (pronounced Sing; the “-ha” is silent).
On a side note, there used to be only two types of beer available in Thailand, Singha and the now-defunct Kloster, with a third called Amarit available only in the Greater Bangkok area if you could ever find it. No imports at all. Then they started allowing beer imports in the 1990s but taxed them heavily and still do so today. I remember when Budweiser first entered, about 1995, and all the Thais would order Budweiser in bars and restaurants to show how sophisticated and international they were. Fucking Budweiser! And they paid out the nose for it too. Fortunately, that piss water is now found largely only on the shelves of Western-oriented supermarkets. Still commands a ripoff price though.
This is my usual go-to; it probably helps that I work in a pharmacy, and often know the actual manufacturers of what we carry.
If there are multiple tiers of generics, and I want generic, the lowest tier is fine. Walmart, Kroger, etc., often have low-end no-name generics, mid-tier store brands, and high-end premium store brands. Usually all of them are sourced from the same manufacturer. Let’s see, 88 cents for 200 ct. 325 mg aspirin from LNK, or 98 cents for 100 of them from LNK in an Equate-branded bottle. I’ve switched a lot of generic loratadine users to our 88 cent brand; same company, the only difference is in pill shape. It’s also pretty clear when companies like Bayer or Church & Dwight are supplying the generics. A big giveaway is when the embossed printing on the top of child-proof caps is exactly the same on name brand vs. generic.
Pretty much all of the generic contact lens solutions are made by Valeant, which also owns Bausch and Lomb.
Of newer ones, I’ve not been too successful yet showing folks looking for Plan B that the “generic” Take Action is the exact same medication from the same company. It’s almost $20 less.
Oh, the wine reminds me - when I was in Florence (Italy, not South Carolina) I went to a wine shop and asked the proprietor for a recommendation for a decent but not too pricey Chianti. Dude whose business it was to sell me wine told me to get the cheapest one with the rooster wrapper on it (the one that means it’s “official Chianti”) because the rules are so strict that his opinion was that there’s not enough difference to spend money on.
Of course, in America there are a ton of little wrappers that look very similar to the official ones.
That’s really true of anything that’s certified to a certain standard. Chianti (and plenty of other wines) are certified to be from a certain geographic area, and to use/not use certain winemaking processes and ingredients. So you’re pretty sure that if you get a DOC or DOCG Chianti, that you’re getting the real thing, grown in the Chianti region, using a very high proportion of Sangiovese grapes, and produced using the traditional methods. Of course, there’s variation within that, but it’ll be recognizably Chianti, and likely of some minimum quality standard.
Motor oil is another similar item. Most oils sold anywhere but a convenience store likely meet one or more of the API standards for motor oil, and as such will carry the API certified starburst. Different letter combinations denote different, backward compatible standards. For example, today’s API standard is “SN”, meaning that it’s for spark ignition engines (i.e. gasoline powered), and it’s “N” in the sequence, meaning it’s valid for current engines and past engines.
If for some reason, you found an old bottle of SH rated oil, it would be good for 1996 and older engines, but not adequate for modern engines.
Some manufacturers have their own- VW has the 502.XX series of standards, and GM has DEXOS 2, etc…
The point being, that if your car calls for say… SM like my pickup does, you can use pretty much any SM or SN oil and be guaranteed of meeting the minimum performance and quality standards. So if that’s what you’re concerned with, there’s no reason to get Pennzoil, if you can get Coastal or O’Reilly brand for less, as long as they meet the requisite standards.
Of course, there are synthetic oils and the like that purport to exceed the standards, but it’s hard to quantify directly, except that you’re fairly assured of getting a higher quality oil if they meet both the API standards and a large proportion of the various manufacturer standards.
