I’ve been worked to the bone this week, the project I’m working on has finally come to fruition, and although the deployment went well I’ve still be flat out the last few days. So, last night I came home from work, dead tired, to find that we still had no food. I had hoped that maybe some would appear, but - that was setting my expectations too high.

To make a long story short, I went to price chopper and picked up some essentials. It wasn’t until I got to the Graham Cracker aisle that I got stuck in my tracks. I usually buy the price chopper brand graham crackers. You know, they are significantly cheaper than keepler or nabisco, and only suck slightly less. But I though to myself, how much suckier could the even-cheaper generic “save more” be? The store brand is already about 70 cents cheaper than the major brand, and generic is another 70 cents. So I got one of each.

After getting home and assembling some food and eating the food, we had a graham cracker taste test. My wife said she could smell the difference, but I don’t think there was any. In fact, I think that they came off the same assembly line in the same factory! The boxes were exactly the same shape and size - one had the price chopper brand and colors, the other was yellow with “save more”. Upon opening the box, you see all the printer sync lines and color blocks, they were identical! The inner wrapped bags were identical, the shape of the crackers were identical. After removing them from the box, I had to mark them with a marker to tell them apart. I think they were exactly identical.

So, I don’t think you can compare the store brand or generic to a major brand. Justifying spending less on the store brand is acceptable, but you know that the quality will be less, and you have to just take that if you want to save some money. BUT, going down another notch, and getting the same quality? That seems like a bit of a rip off. It turns out that (in this case) store brand and generic are exactly the same thing, but you pay for the extra “brand” of the store. The generic costs 37% less, that is very significant!

Anyways - Graham Crackers were invented by Sylvester Graham, and were originally made from Graham flour, and were part of his Graham diet. The diet was designed to prevent impure thoughts and stop masterbation (and thus blindness). The diet was composed of fruit and veg, high fiber, no meat, no spices - ketchup and mustart could induce insanity. Today’s graham crackers are made with refined bleached white flour and packed with sugar and honey - making them a snack rather than a health food product.