In this short blog post, I will be debating the opinion that names brand are overrated, generally. I say generally because I do believe/agree that if you are getting a name brand product such as Levi jeans, Vitamix blender, or a Kitchen Aid product, then yeah get those. Those are trusted name brand products and have been used by thousands of people and so they are worth paying the higher price. This touches on the ideology of quality and value vs quantity and convenience. Right, it is much easier to hop on to Amazon and pick out a name-brand product that you know without having to do any research on the product itself. Why? Well, you have either heard of or know brands such as Nike, Samsung, and Apple.
However, the quality/value vs quantity/convenience is for another blog post. However, I want to focus on grocery store products because you see these products weekly or even daily. Calculate your weekly expenses at the grocery store. Really, think hard about how much you spend at the grocery store for regular goods. Do you 100% believe that those $ 4.00 bags of name brand chips are worth $1.50 more than the non-name brand of potato chips? This is now an even more important question to ask as inflation is still relatively high, interest rates will continue to go up, the price of electricity is likely to soar this winter, living expenses are high, and we are either in or headed into a recession soon. The dollar you earn only stretches so far in today’s times.
Simply, I think we pay too much for name-brand grocery store products. The margins of quality between name and off-brand products are relatively slim. Why would you pay an extra buck for a name-brand pasta when you can pay 82 cents for non-brand pasta? Better yet, you can buy high-quality pasta at TJ’s for 1 dollar. I found that the name brand for old fashion oats did not taste better than the Walmart or Aldi brand of old fashion oats. Therefore did not warrant the extra $1.50. This doesn’t seem like much, but let’s conduct an experiment. So I buy at least one container of old fashion oats every three weeks. There are 52 weeks in a year, so I buy roughly 17 containers per year. I would save around $25 bucks a year. Not much, but multiply that by 10 years, that’s $250 bucks. Very small changes like that can make a significant impact on your life financially just by not buying the name-brand product.
I believe the reason why we buy name-brand products is that name-brand products are easy to identify and we create a connection with them. Snacks are a great example and culprit, especially for college students. Everyone knows Oreos, Doritos, and Pop-tarts! Now, I don’t think any non-brand product’s can beat Doritos. That is a good example that there are plenty of exceptions to this ideology. However, I think products you use daily, you should opt to buy the non-brand product once to see if the quality degrades with price. Try the non-brands at your local store and see. You might be surprised by the results, and even better, save money in the short and long run.