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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3318 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why do people buy name brand over generic groceries? They're often identical. Are people just stupid? But it's such a blatant case about which product is better. They'll be identical products, next to each other on the shelf, except one costs about 25% less. The only difference is that the other product has commercials advertising it. I have friends insist that name brand tastes better, but the contents are literally identical.

I would guess that many people don't really just think it through that much - if they want, say, cornflakes, they'll just stop at the cornflake shelf, extend their hand and take something, which is usually more expensive than if they just crouched down to take a cheaper product (usually stocked at a lower shelf).

I've noticed that once I started ordering regularly groceries online with home delivery it's led to me to select more store-brand stuff, since it's easier to just sort by unit price or something.

Some things are nearly identical (I couldn't identify the difference between store brand and Uncle Ben's rice, for example) but other things, particularly processed foods, do have a noticeable gap. Offbrand cola is disgusting, for example.

Offbrand cola is disgusting, for example.

Lots of people share this sentiment, but I'll admit I personally never understood this. Maybe I've been lucky enough to encounter just good off-brand cola, but I've overwhelmingly found that off-brand is more than good enough compared to Coca Cola or Pepsi. I'm also one of the weird people who significantly prefers Pepsi to Coca Cola (and Diet Pepsi to Diet Coke) and also likes to flatten my colas first by shaking the bottle and letting it dissipate, so maybe I just have weird tastes in soft drinks.

If you like to flatten your soft drinks, there is no "maybe" about having weird tastes in soft drinks. They're not force carbonated because people just love the joy of bottles gushing if they're shaken up.

I just don't understand why people continue to put so much effort into making the experience of drinking something more painful and more likely to cause bloating and gas. With beer, I see the carbonation as an acceptable consequence of the brewing process that also serves as a helpful way of enforcing a speed limit in taking in the alcohol. But with soft drinks, neither excuse exists.

It's just a matter of personal preference. I find the carbonation increases the flavor experience and clearly a lot of other people do as well. Maybe you just have a more sensitive mouth/throat than other people which causes you to find carbonation more painful. I don't think most people would say carbonation is painful and it could just be your body not being suited for it. It's like how some people when eating Hershey's chocolate find it tastes like bile while others don't.

I find your point more understandable if you were talking about spicy food, some people love extremely spicy food. Spicy food causes pain/discomfort to a lot of people during and after eating. Do you find some people's preference for spicy food just as puzzling?

I find the carbonation increases the flavor experience

Yep. The carbonation produces carbonic acid in the water. That gives beer and soda the correct smell and taste. "Why does flat soda taste so bad?" Because the acid bite is missing.

Liking spicy food isn't nearly as ubiquitous as liking carbonated soft drinks. There's a pretty sizeable niche of people (a niche that includes myself) that really enjoys spicy food, but that niche is smaller than the pool of soft drink enjoyers, even that niche doesn't partake in spicy food all the time, at least not as often as soft drink enjoyers drink carbonated beverages. This is in a large part because even spicy food enthusiasts tend to acknowledge that the experience has a significant painful portion that needs to be managed, and that the pain is part of the point, unlike with soda.

I wouldn't be surprised if I do have more sensitive mouth/throat than most, though, since I tend to be more sensitive to texture in food than most people I've encountered. And I'll note that @DradisPing guessed correctly in that I absolutely have a sweet tooth.

There are dozens of us!

The carbonation makes the drink taste less sweet, Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, so I suspect you just have a sweet tooth.

I'm reminded of when someone did a big study of children's breakfast cereal. They compared generic and name brands.

After crunching the data they learned that kids preferred whichever one had more sugar.

Pepsi is slightly sweeter and has less acidity, which is why they can always be assured that in blind tests (where people have just a sip from a small paper sample cup) the majority prefer Pepsi.

Offbrand cola is disgusting, for example.

How do we know they are objectively worse than brand colas without using your prior exposure to brand colas?

Cola is flavored primarily with a mix of vanilla and cinnamon; off brand colas tend to overdo the vanilla at the expense of cinnamon, which to me has always been the primary flavor.

Pepsi’s 1893 which was discontinued a few years ago was made with actual kola nut and the original flavoring proportions was excellent. I wish I could find a real kola cola in the UK but sadly I haven’t yet.

The primary reason to buy name brands isn't quality per se, but predictability. The same name brands are available nationwide, and while they do sometimes change their formulations, they tend to do so infrequently and carefully. A given generic brand is often not available everywhere (many are store-specific), stores/chains may vary which generics they carry over time, and even within a single generic brand there tends to be less focus on consistency, because what's the point in prioritizing that if you haven't got a well-known brand people have very specific expectations of?

People don't want to roll the dice on every purchase. Will this ketchup be too acidic? Will these cornflakes be a little gritty? They're willing to pay a dollar or three more to reliably get the thing they expect.

I prefer name-brands over generics for several categories in which I've tried the generics and they are definitely worse quality for not much less money. I don't have particularly great taste, so it has to be pretty significantly worse for me to notice and care. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe you are. I don't see anybody trying to prove that the specific products I'm comparing here are actually identical.

In Britain there's a popular-ish show called 'Eat Well for Less', with Greg Wallace, in which for a week a family who thinks they need to reduce their food bill has all their groceries replaced with new ones with all the branding removed so they don't know what they're getting. Invariably none of them can tell the difference when their branded products are replaced with the cheapo own-brand 'value' range, despite them all usually insisting beforehand that they'll be able to tell. Most amusing though is when they insist they don't like the replacement, only to find out they've been double bluffed and it was in fact the same brand as they have always been eating/drinking, and they look like morons. The vast majority of people who genuinely think they can tell a difference have definitely just been sucked in by marketing, which I suspect applies to most of the people in this thread insisting 'no, Heinz ketchup really is different to all the others!'.

Do they actually go over what percentage of overall food spending these brand changes represent? It looks like just a trick to amuse viewers, and not a big part of the actual saving money part of things. When I looked up a show, one of the results was a recipe for a potato soup, which, sure.

Last night we were eating burgers, and first we decided to get the (store brand) ones with slightly higher quality meat, then we grilled them with charcoal (is charcoal branding a thing? I don't know), then we decided that since the coals were already warm, why not grill some (store brand) shrimp as well? And since there was shrimp, I got some (sure, way more expensive than generic supermarket corn) farmer's market blue corn grits ready for breakfast. We also consumed soda, then manhattans.

If we really wanted to save money, we would have made completely different choices along multiple axes unrelated to brands. The brands or lack thereof were not a major factor in how much the meal cost.

Yeah they'll usually be some sort of VO saying 'if the Smith family switch to Tesco value baked beans they can save £100 a year' or whatever. There are other sorts of changes which perhaps make more of difference; usually cooking more meals from scratch and avoiding silly 'conveniences' with a big markup like pre-grated cheese and pre-chopped vegetables, but there are definitely substantial savings to be had from avoiding big brand names.

Color me skeptical of just how honest the show is being with participants and viewers. I remember back a couple decades ago when I first started hearing these stories about how social science had proved that people can't tell the difference between cheap wine and fancy wine, and sometimes can't even tell the difference between red and white wine in a blinded taste test. Me, as an absolute moron, simply believed that these smug hacks were doing actual scientific work where they were engaged in truth-seeking adopted that stance as a smug hack and repeated this "fact" about how stupid these rich people were.

Fast forward a couple decades, and I am a whiskey enthusiast. With dozens of bottles on the shelf, I can correctly identify specific bourbons in blinded taste tests without any real problem. I'm not even talking about things that are dramatically different styles - I can consistently identify the difference between Old Forester single barrel picks and Four Roses single barrel picks. These are barely different products at all, both being (primarily) corn distillate aged in charred, new American oak barrels for a few years, then dumped and bottled at barrel-proof. And yet, they're easy for anyone that enjoys bourbon to tell apart. While I haven't replicated such a test with wine because I'm not much of a wine enthusiast, there is simply no goddamned way that anyone that has any experience is going to confuse a sauv blanc with a cabernet.

So, when I hear that there is a show that profits from making people look stupid when they fail to identify the difference between products that literally have different ingredients, I am skeptical. What are they doing to arrive at that presentation? I don't know, but I bet that if I can tell the difference a couple bourbons, many people can actually tell the difference between Frank's Red Hot, Tabasco, and store brands without any trouble.

many people can actually tell the difference between Frank's Red Hot, Tabasco, and store brands without any trouble.

Are there people who can't tell Frank's Red Hot and Tabasco apart? They use different peppers. Frank's has paprika and garlic powder in it. Frank's is much more about adding flavour.

Tabasco tastes like vinegar and fire. It's used when you want to add neutral heat.

Store brands vary wildly.

and sometimes can't even tell the difference between red and white wine in a blinded taste test

Scott himself wrote an article about that exact thing: Is Wine Fake?, and yes, the study where people were tricked with colored wine was as garbage as one might expect – they tested undergraduates and not experts, and the test consisted of affixing descriptors to two wines, which resulted in them affixing the red-wine associated ones to red-colored wines more often than chance. Going from this to "people can't tell red and white wines apart" is a Grand Canyon-sized leap.

they tested undergraduates and not experts

Why would they necessarily want experts? If all they setting out to prove is that ordinary people can't tell the difference between better and worse wines, then obviously they wouldn't test experts or enthusiasts.

a show that profits from making people look stupid when they fail to identify the difference between products that literally have different ingredients

FWIW it's BBC so they're actually not making a profit, though obviously yes the individual showrunners and the BBC at large want to see the programs get good ratings.

I think the general point though is that of course if you care to pay attention to these things you can tell the difference, but most people are not an 'enthusiast' about most of the things they eat and drink. A ketchup enthusiast may have genuine and consistent preferences, but I doubt that's true of the majority of the population. On the whole it's a pretty sedate show and if you watch it while there are sections of the show (not the swaps week bit) which are likely semi-staged (alongside ordinary consumer advice scripted bits in factories etc. which aren't pretending to not be so) I doubt anybody would care enough to fake it. Most of the time they aren't make to look total fools - in fact much of the time they will correctly identify that something has changed, but will say they don't mind it anyway and would happily change to save money. So often rather than not being able to tell the difference (though that does happen) it's more that own-brand stuff is not actually worse than brand-name even if 'different'.

between products that literally have different ingredients

Well they aren't usually as different as the example of hot sauces, it's more things like cheese, vegetables, soft drinks etc.

Depends on the store. French retailer Auchan has famously bad generic groceries in Russia under their "Every day" brand, but its other store brands are fine.

Whole Foods cola. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a worse no label product in my life.

Some no name products are better and some are worse.

I generally limit name brand stuff because most of those brands seem overloaded with sugar.

This varies a lot. Sometimes the generic brands are the same material rebadged. Sometimes they are better! But they're seldom going through the same production plants and distribution processes. Even when the materials are the same -- milk is milk! -- this can lead to dramatically different spoilage times. For stuff with widely varying recipes, like bread, the differences can be visible from a distance.

Store brands are definitely worth a shot, but it's worth being aware of their limitations.

Some things can be close, others are pretty far. Jif peanut butter and Heinz ketchup are not equalled by any other brand of either. Some things can be pretty close, my local store's hot dogs are better than national brand's but their similar in price to more expensive (when the national brand is on sale).

The listed ingredients of Alton Brown's variations on the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe would have very similar ingredients, if listed in the commercial format, but the small differences and different preparations make a noticable difference in the final product.

How do you know that the contents are literally identical? Can you give me an example of the products you're talking about?

Many generic products are subtly worse, or at least different in ways that one might rationally prefer the name brand. And figuring out which is which takes time and energy, for every Kirkland Signature albacore tuna which is superior there's JoeJoes trader Joe's knockoff Oreos which are in-fucking-edible. Trying those has costs involved, so people just buy name brand.

I assume someone must like the shitty generics enough to make it worth selling them, so tastes as always differ. Consider that you might have a less discerning taste regarding, idk, pasta sauce or whatever.

You're just wrong, joe joes are delicious.

Exactly my point, you could get me cross faded and have me hike ten miles and I'd still leave a box of Joe Joe's alone on the table.

Counterexample from the FTC:

(¶ 16) Respondents [JM Smucker (Crisco) and Conagra (Wesson)] do not sell their products directly to end consumers. Instead, both Respondents sell their branded canola and vegetable oils to retailers, including grocery stores (such as Giant), mass merchants (such as Target), club stores (such as BJ’s Wholesale Club), and convenience stores. Retailers purchase canola and vegetable oils at wholesale from suppliers such as Smucker and Conagra and sell them at retail to their in-store customers, the end consumers.

(¶ 19) In addition to buying canola and vegetable oils from the national brands, retailers also frequently sell canola and vegetable oils under their own label. Most retailers that have “private label” canola and vegetable oils typically price it at a lower retail price than the national brands, usually 10–20% below the brand price. Retailers generally contract with a third-party oil producer, such as Cargill or Stratas, to manufacture their private label oils. The process by which retailers supply themselves with private label canola and vegetable oils is separate, and different, from the way retailers buy and sell branded canola and vegetable oils.

(¶ 21) Smucker and Conagra do not participate in or bid to supply private label to retailers. While one of the rationales for the Acquisition is to fill excess capacity at Smucker’s Cincinnati plant by buying the Wesson brand and its corresponding volume, Smucker has elected not to increase its capacity utilization through a less anticompetitive alternative. For example, Smucker could supply private label oils to retailers or produce private label oils for a private label supplier that lacks sufficient capacity itself, which Smucker recently did for Cargill.

So, you typically will not find Crisco or Wesson vegetable oil repackaged under the grocery store's generic brand (though it does sometimes happen, as shown in the second item bolded above). Rather, generic vegetable oil is made by other manufacturers (at least as of year 2018).

The point isn't that it's literally exactly the same company/plant producing it, it's that the differences really don't make any difference; certainly not enough to warrant paying a premium. If you did put generic vegetable oil in a fancy bottle, I doubt anybody who wasn't some kind of expert/chef would actually notice any difference. Indeed, they presumably use generic bulk stuff in actual kitchens, even in nice restaurants, so it should be good enough for you or I at home.

The point isn't that it's literally exactly the same company/plant producing it, it's that the differences really don't make any difference

I did intend both points tbh. Sometimes it is literally the exact same plant producing it, and that's even more egregious. But even in the lesser cases, I don't expect there's a meaningful difference between Smucker/Conagra and no name brands like you say.

Example? Even something like milk is usually better with a name brand.

I have a sweet tooth and most notable to me is how there are dollar store brand chocolates that are a third of the price of name brand like Snickers or KitKat, but are identical. If you want actually high quality chocolate you have to pay more, but I'm talking about paying 33 cents instead of a dollar. And the two chocolates will be side by side on the shelf.

Chocolates are one of the items where I almost never see a store brand equivalent, though I don't shop at Dollar General or Dollar Tree or whatever, so maybe I'm missing out.

Costco has excellent store brand baked goods and alcohol, so I would certainly give a KitKat knockoff a try there, but have never seen anything like that. Or Sam's Club, either. I don't live near an Aldi's anymore, but I think their chocolates were German brands.

Trader Joes has good chocolate covered peanut butter and chocolate covered creamy mints, but they are a quite distinct products from Yorkshire peppermint patties or Reeses. Also, I consider Trader Joes a strong enough brand not to classify their products generic.

Trader Joes has excellent store branded chocolate. Or do you mean a knock off version of say a Kit Kat or Neslte Crunch bar?

Yeah, I meant the Dollar Store knock offs.

I haven't looked into whether TJ's chocolate is a better price than other brands, but I just buy it because it's good in general, not necessarily to save money.

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