My main theme is : can ("pricey") brand name items survive generic brand competition ?
Many, many years ago (probably at least thirty years ago), Forbes magazine (a business magazine, in case you have never heard of it) ...
had a cover story (about generic brand competition) titled (assuming I am remembering correctly) :
"Hell no, we won't pay."
( A "play" on the "iconic" anti-Vietnam War draft chant : "Hell no, we won't go.")
(Note -- I just tried Internet searches to find this (ancient) Forbes thing. I cannot find it. I do find something more recent in Forbes with the exact same title. I guess these "Hell no ..." things are just irresistible to writers looking for a "catchy" title ...)
The Forbes article was about generic brands encroaching on long-time successful / well-known / extremely profitable consumer brands.
My own experience has been :
as a child growing up in the 1960s, pretty much everything in our household was the "name brand" item. (They were practically all that was available then, of course.)
Now (2021), a surprisingly large number of items in our household are the generic brand (even though we could afford the brand name, if we wanted.)
My wife and I repeatedly compare generic individual items to brand name items, and decide whether we can perceive any difference.
I LOVE it when the generic item is better ! This has happened MANY times.
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Re : when the generic item is better --
another "assuming I am remembering correctly" thing from reading Forbes (decades ago), regarding aluminum foil.
I recall reading an article about Reynolds Metals, where it said :
Reynolds "rolls" its aluminum for Reynolds Aluminum Foil exactly 3/1000 of an inch thick, and also manufactured aluminum foil to be sold by generic marketers, but rolled that aluminum exactly 2/1000 of an inch thick.
This made perfect sense to me. Reynolds Metals has to preserve the superiority of "the brand name" item's brand.
(By the way, I just looked up some stuff about Reynolds / aluminum foil / etc. on Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
and
en.wikipedia.org
and it appears that my recollection of the 3/1000 inch and 2/1000 inch numbers are not correct. But, whatever the numbers are or were, the idea was still correct (produce inferior stuff for the generic sellers.))
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Anyway ... to give a WHAT ??? - example of generics (now). We buy "brand X" saltines at Aldi for $0.75 for your standard one pound box (with four individual 4 ounce plastic wrapped things inside.)
This is roughly 75% cheaper than "the name brand." AND ... the generic saltines taste much BETTER than the brand name saltines (at least, to our "taste.)
This is just crazy.
This should not be possible.
Anyone who tries the Aldi store generic saltines would ( I assume) never once in the rest of their life "pay up" for the inferior brand name item.
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Not all of the generic items at Aldi or Walmart are equal (or better) than the brand name items.
But, a lot of them are.
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This brings me to ......................... CEREAL. And ... Kellogg's.
I am stopping for now.
More later.
Jon.
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