The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

You guys should be old enough to remember this stuff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USDi0gP3lNw) from the '80s.  Out here in NorCal, it was black print on a yellow label, but I've heard that in some regions it was black-on-white.

Did any of your parents buy these products when you were young?

It was black and white by me, but I think it was pretty short lived with only about a year or two later the "generic" was replaced with store brand. 

Black and white here.  And a lot of it was just as good.   Generic products generally are just as good as their name brand counterparts.   The only exceptions are Oreo cookies, Tide laundry detergent, and Haagen Daaz ice cream.   Nothing generic beats those brands.

My parents were generally unwise consumers and bought brand named things generally.

It's been a while but in my experience, off label products typically suck by comparison. I never cared for the Aldi trips.

Varies by product and line.  I have never had a Kirkland signature product that wasn't as good or better than the advertised brand.  Target also has good quality control on their brands.  Walmart is mixed.  Anything off brand on Amazon is trash.

You guys have peaked my interest. I'm going to have to try a few things to see if things have changed.

CF, there really isn't such a thing as generic stuff.

It's literally another product in different packaging.  You might not like the other product as much, but it's not some garbage thing.  Publix doesn't have an ice cream factory.  It's literally another brand and they pay less to slap their label on it.

While you are right Publix doesn't have an ice cream factory in *some* case the generic/store brand has lower standards.  Sometimes this is a big deal sometimes it is not.

I knew someone who worked in a bakery the national brand as did one of the store brands required that all the chocolate chip cookies be perfectly round and unbroken.  Two of the store brands allowed for up to 10% of the cookies to be broken or deformed.  One of the store brand only required that 50% of the cookies be round an unbroken.  All the cookies tasted the same and was made at the same time but the generics got the "defective cookies"  In my opinion that isn't a big deal.  But on the other hand generic batteries that are from batches that didn't meet the standards of the name brands is not something I want.  Costco and Target have high standards for their generics.  Walmart is a mixed bag.  Dollar tree is mostly stuff that doesn't meet the standards of everyone else. 

I get what you are saying. I wasn't really speaking about Publix or store brands though. The few things we do use of theirs is perfectly fine. I was meaning more of knock offs like Magic Treasures instead of Lucky Charms.

Buy a box.   Odds are its going to be just as good as Lucky Charms just 30% cheaper.  If it is you are now saving 30% on every box of for the rest of your life.  It sucks you are out the cost of one box. 

More accurately: buy a bag

If you are still buying cereal in boxes, you are among the elite upper class in our society.  Bagged cereal is the mark of the true working class  :D

Some things are good others are not. You just have to press your luck to figure out what they are. I have never encountered a good Doritos knock off. Winn Dixie has a really good Heinz 57 knock off. It's just trial and error.

Hahaha ... I never realised I was elite. I also didn't know you could buy a bag of cereal. We buy BOGO boxes and pour it into sealed containers to keep it fresh. Cereal isn't an every week thing. We typically have Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, and Cap'N Crunch on hand just in case.

It's funny that you say this, because I took a college class from my favorite professor ever (several classes, actually).  He taught about drugs and sex and health, mostly.  But his biggest thing he said was that he wanted to make us smart consumers.

He said that if there's only one thing you ever buy generic, make it batteries.  I buy generic batteries.  Even if they're 25% less effective (they aren't), but even if they were, they're like 1/5 of the cost.

Saving money on the batteries in my flash light doesn't do me much good if the thing won't work when I need it.  I guess if most of your battery use involves toys that would be okay.  But most of my battery use is flashlight, smoke detector,  CO detector, thermostat.  I would be willing to put a generic in my tv remote but not the other items. 
The few times I bought generic batteries they corroded while they were still in the packaging.  Granted I had been storing them for over a year, but I like to keep a lot of batteries on hand for power outages so storage life matters. 

I will buy no name car wax, but not no name brake pads.

In recent years, we purchase alkaline batteries from BJs and Sam's. I honestly haven't noticed a difference from the Eveready and Duracells we used to buy.

It's usually at the far end of the cereal aisle.  There are a lot of bagged cereals from companies like Malt-O-Meal.
(https://www.maltomeal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Cocoa-Dyno-Bites-cereal-500x500.png)

I only buy premium batteries (Energizer Ultimate Lithium) and it has nothing to do with cost or performance.  Cheap batteries leak/corrode and I am far more concerned with my (potentially expensive) devices being damaged by corroded batteries than I am with battery costs.  Energizer claims their Ultimate Lithium batteries will never leak; I've been using them for around a decade and so far, so good.

And that cereal is actually better for you health wise than it's brand name counterpart, Post Cocoa Pebbles.

Kinda like Ovaltine vs Nestle Quik.

Re: Batteries

I have a weird relationship with batteries.  I grew up in a very loving, but rather disorganized and sometimes chaotic home in terms of storage and tools and stuff.  My parents were older and my siblings age span is large, so there was just a lot of coming and going and hustle and bustle, in addition to having lots of things that didn't have a defined place, and even if it did, odds were high that the previous person didn't put the thing back.

If you wanted AA batteries for your remote control car, you were probably going to have to steal them from a remote control somewhere else in the house.  That made for a frustrating situation, whenever you had to fix something.

That imprinted on me, so my garage and my tools and (things like batteries) in my adult life are all organized and upkept.  I maintain a full collection of batteries of all sizes.  I'm very good about having each tool have a logical place (and people don't always put everything back in my house, either, but everything has a home.)  If you need a battery, I will have a fresh one, with a tester available.  And I replace batteries as soon as they show signs of degrading.  I also don't store my things with batteries inside them.  I'm kind of a stickler about that.

I also keep fresh batteries at the ready, though in defense of our parents, far fewer devices take batteries in 2026 than in 1986.  Other than TV remotes, most small devices in my house have a USB charging port.  (I also don't have kids.)

The primary reason why I use premium batteries is precisely so I can store things with batteries inside them, instead of having to go hunt down batteries every time  Now, there are some poorly designed devices with huge vampire power draw that will drain batteries while idle, and I'll leave those empty, grabbing some batteries when I need to use them.  But for most stuff, I'd rather just leave batteries in full time.

It was black and white (we called it plain label) where I lived in upstate NY, I remember there was a grocery chain called Great American that carried those products.  They were not as good as today's store brand items; they were more like leftovers.  For example, a can of peas would have large and small peas in the can, unlike a name brand would have all uniform size peas.  I tried the plain label beer and even as an underage drinker with not a lot of experience I knew that beer was disgusting crap. lol