Frugality tips: when to buy name-brand products, when to buy generics

Part of my path to frugality has been learning to do without name-brand groceries. Often, there's really no difference between a name-brand product and the supermarket generic brand (or the version you can get in the bulk bins). In fact, sometimes it's the same company who makes a slightly less fancy version of the same product for the supermarket, so you aren't necessarily doing any better by getting the expensive name-brand one.

However, I've been forced to realize that you can't get generic brands 100% of the time, because sometimes they simply aren't up to scratch. Here are my carefully-researched findings so far.

Generic/bulk products that are absolutely fine:

1. Produce. I see no reason to buy some pre-packaged bag of name-brand spinach when right next door to it is a bin full of loose spinach that you can bag yourself for half the price. And so on.
2. Baking supplies. Flour, sugar, oats, dried fruit, nuts--they're all probably fresher, and they cost lots and lots less when you buy them in bulk. (I make an exception for yeast, baking powder and baking soda. I prefer name-brands for those ones for quality reasons.)
3. Dried products like rice, pasta, beans. All fine.
4. Tea. At my supermarket, you can buy tea bags in the bulk section. The same brands cost far less per tea bag than if you got them all packed up in a box on the other side of the store. I find this mystifying. 
5. Other drinks, such as soda and sports drinks. I don't drink them myself, but on the rare occasion that I've tried a supermarket-brand cola or lemon-lime soda, I've found them indistinguishable from Coke or Sprite. Of course, people who drink soda and sports drinks regularly may have a more sensitive palate than mine when it comes to these things. 
6. Canned goods of all types. I'm not very experienced with canned vegetables, since I'm more of a frozen veg girl myself, but I consume vast quantities of canned tomatoes and tomato paste, and the expensive ones really aren't sufficiently better than the generic ones for me to bother with them. What's more, my supermarket's own brand of tomatoes doesn't have a BPA liner, which is actually pretty unusual for canned tomatoes.
7. Frozen vegetables and fruits. I honestly can't tell the difference. I mean, frozen peas are frozen peas. I love that I can buy huge bags of them for eighty cents. Some people don't like frozen vegetables because they think they taste funny. My advice is to find out when they were packaged (it's usually stamped on the bag somewhere) and avoid anything older than a couple of weeks old. That way you won't have to deal with freezer burn.
8. Spices. The best thing, of course, is if you have a specialized Indian grocery store in your vicinity, which I don't. That way, you can get super-cheap, very fresh spices (because of the high turnover). But I'm lucky to live near a store that has all the spices I use in my cooking in the bulk section, and they're really very cheap. One of my most unfavorite things in the world is those horrid little jars of spices that sell for $7-10 each, and who knows how long they've been sitting there? Of course, this means that my kitchen is a mess of different-sized jars full of sometimes unlabeled spices, but at least they were cheap.

Things you really need the name-brand for:

1. The top one is boxed macaroni and cheese. I rarely get this stuff, but sometimes you have a hangover and all you want is radioactive orange goodness. I don't like endorsing a moderately evil company, but Kraft is really the only one that will do. I have never tried a generic mac'n'cheese that wasn't utterly revolting. And don't talk to me about the Annie's organic stuff. It doesn't taste good. It probably doesn't give you cancer either, but...well, you probably shouldn't eat boxed mac'n'cheese anyway. You have been warned.
2. Mayonnaise. I seldom buy mayonnaise at the moment, but I had to get some last month to make an eccentric chocolate cake recipe for my daughter's birthday. I decided to economize by not getting the Best Foods/Hellmann's brand, and got the store brand instead. Big mistake. It was vile. Subsequent research (i.e. asking my girlfriends) has revealed that no one has ever had a good experience with generic mayonnaise. Best Foods or make your own are the only two choices. And I've decided, after several failures, that life is too short to be faffing about trying to make mayonnaise.
3. Dairy products. I can't, to my sorrow, live a totally organic-foods lifestyle. I've decided the benefits of eating non-organic fruits and vegetables outweigh the risks of the pesticide residues they contain. But I draw the line at non-organic dairy. I feel that my daughter deserves to grow up without ingesting a whole lot of bovine growth hormones, thanks very much, so we drink organic milk, and when we get non-organic dairy products, I make sure that they come from cows that haven't been fed growth hormones. I definitely won't use supermarket-brand dairy products, even though in some cases they're half the price of the organic ones I buy. 
4. Meat. I don't want to buy meat from animals that are full of poisons and have lived horrible lives and died horrible deaths. I would rather be a vegetarian (noooooo!). So I've started buying progressively less and less meat, but when I do, I make sure that the packaging indicates that it's all-natural and cruelty-free. I don't know how much to believe the labels. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there's no way that the chicken we eat can really be all-natural and cruelty-free for the price that it is. Still, I don't buy the supermarket brand.
5. Coffee. I'd rather not drink coffee at all than drink bad coffee. Coffee is now the one thing I don't buy from the supermarket, having had a couple of bad experiences with it in the past. It costs more or less the same to go to a really good independent coffee roasting place where you can ask them where the beans came from, so why not do that from time to time? Mr. B and I don't drink tremendous amounts of coffee because of the price of it, but when we do, we want to enjoy it.
6. Cereal. Knock-off cereal is usually vile. I don't eat much processed cereal these days (Baby B and I are porridge fanatics, and only steel-cut oats will do), but I've tried all manner of knock-offs of Special K, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Chex, etc, and none of them ever taste quite right.

It occurs to me that although this is a food blog, I could include a few other groceries, since this is a post about supermarket shopping.

Other things for which generics are OK:

1. Shampoos and conditioners. A lot of supermarkets do own-brand versions of popular products that have exactly the same ingredients. I've never encountered one that was sub-standard.
2. Paper products. I'm sure the fancy-pants ones full of moisturizers and scents and cushiony textures are nicer, but come on, it's toilet paper/tissues/paper towels, who really cares? I try to avoid using paper towels much anyway, in favor of washable cloths. I'm told the cloth handkerchief is making a comeback, too.
3. Feminine hygiene products. The supermarket ones are fine. Stop being such a priss.
4. Soaps (see shampoos). 
5. Dish and laundry detergents. Cleaning supplies in general. Fancy cleaning products are a waste of money. Leave them to the professionals, or the paranoid.

Groceries you want name brands for:

1. Trash bags. I have had many, many bad experiences with cheap trash bags. Just believe me on this one. Get the fancy ones that don't split and that tie up properly.
2. Moisturizers and sunscreens. Occasionally the knock-off brands are ok, but others are chock-full of parabens and phthalates. Of course, the originals sometimes have these too, but sometimes the knock-off ones add these chemicals where they didn't exist in the originals. In particular, don't buy knock-off cocoa butter lotion instead of Palmer's. I've never found one that didn't have parabens in it. Palmer's is God's gift to ladies who have sustained a few battle-scars in pregnancy, so I don't mind giving it some free advertising.
3. Pet food. My dog can only digest grain-free food. Bulk and generic pet food Will Not Do.
4. Children's acetaminophen and ibuprofen products. I have done a thorough survey of these products, and have been appalled to see that the supermarket brands are often full of food dyes, artificial flavors, high-fructose corn syrup, and parabens--parabens!--in the ingredients. Just grit your teeth and get the expensive name-brand.