to name brand or not to name brand?

Living on the cheap means sometimes (or often) buying crappy store-brand versions of your favourite products.  Or at least those necessary products that you don't really like but have to buy.  Sometimes you get a product that is just as good for way less money.  Sometimes you get crap that will hang around in your make up bag, cupboard, and under the bathroom sink for the rest of your life, clinging to you like the residue on your glasses.  This creates an aisle dilemma: to name brand or not to name brand?

Here is my own personal, easy to use guide on what products you should really jump the wallet and go name brand for:

1. Q-Tips (The name brand has become synonymous with the product for a reason.  These little sticks with cotton on the tips are harder to make than one might initially imagine.  Problems with the dollar store version: they only seam to put enough cotton on one side of the stick, so you will stab your ear if you start with the wrong side.  Also, the little stick part is super weak and will bend/break faster than I would in an interrogation.)
2. Honey Nut Cheerios (Nutty-O's or whatever they call the off-brand versions of this are gross and don't provide any happiness whatsoever.)
3. Nail Polish Remover (The cheap stuff doesn't even work at all!  It just smudges your nail polish around without removing any!)
4. Pantyliners  (First let me apologize for using the word "panty", as it's gross.  Second, the glue/sticky bottom on the cheap version just doesn't work at all.  These guys bunch like none other.  Spring for the Kotex or Always.  It's so very worth it.)

So now you have it.  Learn from my mistakes.  Save yourselves from stabbed ears, unhappy breakfasts, smudgey toe nail polish, and bunchy pantyliners, and live better lives than I do, now that I have these cheap, crappy Q-Tips in my life that I can't throw out.  Oh, sorry, I mean "two-sided cotton swabs", because Q-Tip is the name brand, and I can't throw them out because that would be just wasteful, so I will use them and be annoyed every morning for the next million years because there are SO MANY Q-Tips (I mean two-sided cotton swabs, ARGH!) in a box!