Peanut Butter and Off-Brand Living

My 3 year old likes to help me with grocery shopping. There are several things that we get nearly every week, and we go to the same two stores every week to grocery shop, so he knows exactly where most things are. Some items we consider “his job” and he gets them off the shelf and bags them after we check out. 

The other day we (me and the 3 year old son and my 10 month old son) were at the store getting our groceries. I strap on in a baby carrier my 10 month old, and my 3 year old walks next to me. As we were in the peanut butter and jelly aisle, my 10 month old started to become a little fussy. As I was bouncing him and trying to calm him, my 3 year old says, “Mom, want me to put this peanut butter in the cart?” He holds it up and I could not see the label, but I could see the back of the jar and it looked like the generic brand that I typically get so I said sure. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized he had actually grabbed the name brand peanut butter. I silently mourned the dollar and change that I could have saved by looking more closely, but quickly moved on thinking it might be nice to have name brand.

One caveat - I have been buying off brand for close to 10 years now. My husband and I got married in college, where we were both taking classes full time and working part time jobs. When you are on that strict of a budget, brand loyalty doesn’t exist. The name of the game is how much can I get for how little money. Fast forward to nearly 10 years of marriage and 2 kids later and I’m still grocery shopping that way. The budget isn’t as tight, but I’ve honed in on what works for us and how far I can make my dollar stretch, so we still don’t have brand loyalty. In fact, I didn’t think the store I was shopping at even carried name brands, except for around the holidays or when there was some type of sale going on. 

So few days later when my son asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I was thinking, “Oh I get to try the name brand peanut butter. This will be nice. What a luxury.” The peanut butter even spread on the bread more smoothly than the generic and I could not wait for my first taste. When my son was settled with his sandwich, I tried mine. I expected to be soaring on a symphony of delights to my tastebuds; instead the entire experience was flat. Don’t get me wrong - it was peanut butter and it was delicious. I just liked the generic brand much better! The richness of the brand name had become a little too much for me. Putting away the ingredients, I had to laugh to myself a little bit. I had expected to really love and enjoy this “luxury” that I accidentally bought, and instead it was somewhat disappointing. “My tastebuds have become accustomed to off brands,” I thought to myself. 

This story is very trivial, but it sparked my thinking. Where else is this “off-brand” thinking manifesting itself in my life? I’ve started to dive in to this question in my own life, and the answers have been surprising to me. I want to take the next several posts to dive into this subject a little more deeply, because I think there is a lot of gold for us to mine here if we will take the time. For now I’ll leave it with this thought: I believe that so much of our life is spent in the realm of generic or off-brand living, that when we encounter the real thing we have no appetite for it because our tastes are trained towards the counterfeit. I believe the dissatisfaction so many live with on a daily basis is a product of not getting what they think they are paying for, and will only be resolved with a change of taste buds.