The End of the ‘Generic’ Grocery-Store Brand

Inflation was high, economic growth was stagnant, and food prices were soaring: It was the 1970s, and everyone needed to eat to stay alive, but no one had any money. So a few enterprising grocery stores had an idea—they began purchasing their own food straight from the manufacturer, putting it in ostentatiously no-frills packaging, and selling it for significantly less than the name-brand stuff. These products were called “generics,” and if out-of-control costs were the problem, they were the solution.

Well, sort of. The peas were starchy; the corn was bland. Generics weren’t awful, but they weren’t that good, either. “They basically were kind of a lesser version of products that people wanted to buy,” Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University, told me. Before Fitzsimons was a consumer psychologist, he was a high-school stock clerk at his local grocery store, and he remembers a lot of the store-brand stuff being “terrible.” It went on the bottom shelf, and both the retailer and the consumer knew that it was an inferior product. “There was,” Greg Sleter, the executive editor of the trade publication Store Brands, told me, “nothing sexy about it.” People hated generics so much that the name itself became a mild insult, synonymous with anything unoriginal or uninspired.

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