free variable

I have come to dread going to Walgreens.

It is undeniably convenient — there are two within walking distance of our house, one of which is open all night, and, while they do not, strictly, sell “everything,” they do seem to sell products that can approximate nearly anything. Such a high-utility store merely has to be competently administered to present a pleasant shopping experience. However, the chaotic store layout, inconsistent stocking, and the overwhelming sense that you could contract a terrible infectious disease from other customers at any moment (few late-night pharmacy customers are healthy) conspire to reduce the overall Walgreens experience to, at best, “grim necessity.”

Tonight, due to a desperate shortage of toddler drugs and a slightly altered route home, I went to our least favorite local Walgreens — the store that isn’t open past ten and where we have encountered uniformly slow-moving, unfriendly, and lackwitted employees. Delightfully, every person I had occasion to deal with tonight was cheerful, speedy, and capable.

Unfortunately, Walgreens was determined to rub refined capsaicin on one of my greatest retail irritations. I found a Walgreens-branded product that was exactly half as expensive as the national brand. While this would ordinarily be a bargain, the Walgreens product also contained exactly half as much medicine.

Why on earth should one-half ounce of Walgreens-brand infant acetaminophen cost exactly half as much as one ounce of Tylenol-brand infant acetaminophen? (The Tylenol is actually a more functional product, since it is dye-free.) Isn’t the point of store-brand products that they identical in every way except the price?

Walgreens is a terrible offender in this arena, since almost no Walgreens-brand product represents good value when compared to a non-generic, but they are certainly not alone. Some local grocers omit the “unit price” display on store brand items, hoping that these knockoff goods — which are sometimes even more expensive per unit (!) than their national-branded equivalents — will appeal to gullible, careless, or arithmetically inept consumers. To its credit, Walgreens does not stoop to this level of chicanery, but it is awfully shady to exploit consumer perceptions of “generic” products by offering goods that are no less expensive than the nationally advertised ones.

Since I assume that a larger percentage of the sticker price of the Walgreens-brand product represents profit for Walgreens, I rewarded their behavior by purchasing the Tylenol. Next time, I’ll probably just trek out to the local bullseye-themed megastore, where the store brand is approximately 60% cheaper than Tylenol.