There’s No Shame in Buying the Store Brand
Hands up everyone who remembers the brief period during the 1980s when kids flung the word “generic” as an insult. (This period roughly corresponds to the political tyranny of Lee Atwater, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Or, as we said back then, a co-inky-dink.)
As with all childhood insults, the origin of “you’re so generic” is difficult to trace, but is undoubtedly rooted somewhere in the distended bowels of contemporary culture. Perhaps it had to do with the beginning of childhood as commodity, the era when Saturday morning cartoons were all based on plastic, vacuum-sealed action figures — after all, what could have been more embarrassing than to ask for a set of Ninja Turtles for Christmas, only to receive a set of Samurai Salamanders? Thanks Grandma. I know you got these at Drug Mart with your Golden Buckeye card.
Or perhaps it was just one last dig at the faltering Soviet Union, the most generic country of all.
Brand loyalty is something that puzzles me, simply because I don’t spend enough time thinking about consumer products to really know the difference between Purex and Tide, or Colgate and Crest, or Coke and Pepsi for that matter. I always just buy the generic brand, or whatever’s on sale, or whatever’s the cheapest. The only exception: Pop Tarts. Toaster Wizards and Frooty Breakfast Slabs just don’t taste the same.
In my worst dreams, those disparaging little cries of “you’re so generic” float up from the cellars of the past, only now the Reagan-era bullies have grown up and become corporate lobbyists, and I fear that the freedom we’re all supposed to work so hard to protect in this country is not the freedom to read and think and practice whatever religion you like, but actually just the freedom to stay brand-loyal.
Now, it’s hard to discuss rampant consumerism without sounding like a humorless, Nader-worshipping conspiracy theorist.* But, as a library patron once reminded me, “sometimes they aren’t conspiracy theories. Sometimes they’re conspiracy facts.”
*I am one of these.
The Creative Workforce Fellowship is a program of the Community Partnership for the Arts and Culture, made possible by the generous support of Cuyahoga County citizens through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.