The Rocky Mountain Collegian

September 6th, 2007

Don’t Waste Cash On Brand Names

While I can’t say that I am totally innocent on buying a brand and not a product, I can say that I know I am doing.  However, I know a lot of people out there who throw their money away because Tylenol is more appealing than Target or Vick’s Nyquil is more “effective” than other brands.  Let’s get real here, are you really going to wake up a new person if you use brand names over generic—doubtful. 

So here are the top ways to put cash back in your pocket and not into a name.

Brand name cleaning products.  I realize that eliminating 99.9% of all the bacteria in your kitchen sounds like an ultimate germ-free environment, but get serious.  Even if you killed such a percentage of bacteria, your kitchen could still be housing a few billion bacteria and that’s if you cleaned every possible surface.  I wont go any further into the antibacterial soaps; you can see for yourself what you waste your money on.  Check out the University of Michigan study, here.  So please, save yourself a few dollars per cleaning product next time.

Brand name drugs.  The bottle may be more appealing, the advertising more effective, or the name might even sound more pleasing to the ears, but don’t buy into it.  The only reason your brand name drugs became trusted and stayed around for so long was because of patents on their products.  Now, however, other companies are picking up on the drugs as the patents expire and they too have the money to get around the patents.  Which in no way should discourage you for their practices but you should be relieved that you can save 3 dollars here, 8 dollars there, or even more.

Brand name food.  This may be the toughest one to grasp, but has the potential to save you loads of cash over the course of the year.  What may be even more difficult for you to grasp is that a vast majority of the generic name foods are made in the same facility as their “competitors.”  For example, did you notice that when the Peter Pan brand of peanut butter was recently recalled that all of the Wal-Mart brand peanut butter was removed from its shelves?  Think about it for just a minute.  That’s because the two are made in the same facility.

Overall, eliminating the brand name from these 3 categories could save you a bundle in just one trip, let alone the potential for savings over a year.  The best part of buying generic brand products is that a lot of them will offer you a guarantee, mail-in rebate, and sale-time savings that go beyond the brand name.  Next time you are at the store, see how much you save.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Coins to Cash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.