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?
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Notes -
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.
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.
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