Sweet, Sweet Store Brands

One of the easiest ways to cut your grocery bill is to, whenever possible, buy store brands instead of national brands A store brand is simply an item sold under a label specific to that store. For Wal-Mart, it’s Great Value. For Brookshire’s, it’s Hy-Top. For Albertson’s it's...well, Albertson’s.

I was watching a cable show the other day that featured a gentlemen billed as an expert at helping people fix their desperate financial situations.

In my humble opinion, he didn’t do a very good job. Yes, he showed that week’s client that she was going broke fast spending more each month than she made, and he worked up a budget for her....but he did little to change her attitudes towards money and how she spent it. One example? He told her to buy store brands, but never really went into detail why. In one scene, the lady is shown in the supermarket trying to pick ketchup....and her reaction to the store brand is “Ugh! I’m not going to buy that stuff!”

Why do we react that way? Because the makers of national brands spend a lot of money persuading us that there is a vast difference in quality between their products and and the store-brand equivalent.

Sometimes there is. Very, very often, there isn’t.

Let’s face it. Frozen peas are pretty much frozen peas. I’ve read that sometimes the peas in a store-brand bag aren’t of “uniform” size , though I’ve personally never seen any evidence of that. But even if true, so what? We’re buying peas, not matching pearls for a Tiffany necklace.

Pasturized milk....is pasturized milk. (I once had a store clerk tell me that the national brand they sold and their own store brand came from the same supplier, they just got different labels in the packaging plant.) Raisins are raisins. Mustard is mustard. And store brand mustard and store brand ketchup taste just fine on my hamburgers, thank you very much.

Salad dressing, instant oatmeal, raisins, mustard, milk, instant tea, orange juice, cereal, steak sauce....those are just a few of the store-brands currently in my pantry and fridge....and I'm pretty picky about the taste of what I eat. If it didn't taste as good--and in my opinion, sometimes better--than the highly advertised national version, I wouldn't buy it.

How much does buying store brands save you? I’ll show you some examples, complete with pictures and prices, in Part II of “Sweet, Sweet Store Brands.”