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...
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