Is it dullish, boring, bland? Without any true identity? Just wallpaper?

Generic really does get a bad rap, doesn't it?

Do you find yourself skulking up to the check out counter if your cart is loaded with store branded items? 

What will your neighbors, peering suspiciously into your cart, think? 

Is the check out person making tsk tsk sounds? Does your check out person actually look at you? I haven't had a checkout person acknowledge me in decades, let alone care what I have in my cart. Except when I am shopping someplace in the Midwest. The only visible response that I get in my local supermarket is a sigh of impatience when I can't decide if I want to do debit or credit.

Anyhow, skulk no more. Feel really smug knowing that you are saving what amounts to the gross national product by buying unbranded items.

Your Key Food breadcrumbs, tin foil and frozen vegetables are no doubt 4C Foods Corp, Alcoa and Birds Eye respectively. Of course, buying frozen vegetables puts you back in the tsk tsk catergory as e v e r y o n e knows that you should only be buying organically grown fruits and veggies.

Which, by the way, are sold partially generically as well. Safeway, for example, has O Organics. Not to be confused with O Magazine, The Oprah Show, or the three hundred spin offs she is generating.

If all of this is giving you a headache, forget the Tylenol, Advils, or Motrins and get your drugstores' own brand. The FDA requires that any product with the same active ingredients meet the same efficacy standards. Thus, your unbranded ibuprofen is Advil. 

But you knew that.

You just got this stuff all mixed up with the L'Oreal messaging and spent way more than you should because you thought "I'm worth it."

You are. It's not.