WHET Generic Groceries?

It's so hard to economize without them.

Plenty of store brands available, isn't it the same thing?

They were mostly awful. Higher quality store brands replaced them.

The only time I ever saw those was when I first went off to college in a small Texas town. They disappeared when the grocery moved to a larger location and got their own store brand. As poor college kids we bought a lot of stuff in that aisle. My freshman roommate used to joke he wanted them to make black and white generic condoms.

I do remember these.

Also, Grand Union used to have the worst store brand food. All I remember off hand are Penguin sodas and early morn' bacon. That shit was terrible.

Is Shasta soda still around?

We used to have No Name products with yellow and black labels, but now the store brand stuff is just as expensive as the name brand stuff.

I remember moving into a new apartment and seeing another apartment dweller, outside, hood of car open, drinking "BEER" from a black and white can. I asked myself: "What kind of apartment complex is this?" Anyway, the complex turned out to be OK as far as neighbors.

Gene & Eric.

Ad for generics.

Store brands are the same thing just without the stigma attached.

Fuck u

Store brands are the exact same thing. They just look better now:

My mom was a Depression baby and we were literally food stamp poor when I was a kid in the 60s so my mom was CHEAP. She'd do things like buy the smallest bottle of Pine-Sol then bitch about how quickly she'd run out. She wouldn't listen to us when we'd tell her buying bigger sizes was more economical.

Back in the early 80s when this generic shit was all over the place my family had a 70 pound Malamute/Samoyed mix. I came home from work to see my mom had bought this 20 pound bag of generic dog food. I took a look at the ingredients and it was basically some almost sawdust filler with the lowest amount of dog nutritional ingredients the law allowed. There was a warning on the bag that said the food should basically only be served to dogs who were almost dead. I threw the bag in my car where she couldn't get at it and bought real dog food. Our dog would have starved to death if she'd fed that shit to him.

Fuck off r13

^^

(signed) His Mom

I think they realized that people are drawn to colorful packaging more than black and white.

The house brands are the same crap in more colorful packaging. Usually made to look similar to the name brands to fool those not paying attention. Aldi is loadede with that crap.

No Frills

No frills. I remember. I am old.

Yeah, I remember it as a kid being called "No Frills", with black-and-white packaging. Almost a design statement in itself.

But the stuff was all crap quality; I think my mother bought some of it to try out about twice, and then never again.

House brands today are generally of a much higher quality than that old no-frills stuff, and they're actually often made by the same manufacturers. This is especially true of Aldi, which r17 is wrongly bashing. They get a lot of their products from brand-name manufacturers.

One really good example is Aldi's Butter Milk Chocolate Biscuits - they are actually the Bahlsen Choco Leibniz Milk Chocolate Biscuits that cost three times as much when you can find them in another store, and they're manufactured by Bahlsen. I love those cookies and tried several imitator brands, but the only authentic ones are the ones Aldi sells, and I found out from an acquaintance who works for the company that they are indeed the same product from Bahlsen.

It was the '80s. It was the talk of the town when Oat Bran was finally made available in that black and white packaging.

Blame or credit Massimo Vignelli's 1973 "big brown bag" design for Bloomingdale's which kicked around for 40 years or so. The concept was applied to a lot of packaging and product design. And then it wasn't.

At some point the shock/delight/humor of the understated no-frills simplicity wore thin. As food products moved toward peak artisanal promotion, more information and the implication of quality and a somewhat different brand of humor continued the theme of simplicity but in different ways. Busy packaging is still mostly unpopular, associated with cheapness. Some products carry on somewhat in the generic tradition and use simplicity to show that their food product contains just three natural ingredients. A retail brand might go bold and flashy, with a bright multicolor design but with minimal text.

For quite some time, r22, I assumed beats headphones were actually a Bloomingdale's product.

That "b", R23. Difficult not to make the link.

I asked somebody I know in the industry and he said it was for a few different reasons:

For one, it cut into sales of store brands. If you're selling a national brand for $2.00 and a generic for $1.00, nobody is going to pay $1.50 for a store brand. Also, premium products started to become a trend. Rather than using limited shelf space to "sell the customer down" on a generic brand, stores developed the mindset that they should dedicate that shelf space to "sell the customer up" on a premium option. He also said that it was inefficient from a supply chain point of view.

Also, R20 is correct... the store brands of today are higher quality than the generic products of that era. Many are as good as or better than the national brand.

My grandmother used to smoke generic cigarettes.

No, she didn't live in a trailer.