Thought dollar store dish soap was a ripoff until my mom's sink in Tulsa changed my mind
Stopped by my mom's place in Tulsa last month and she had this big yellow bottle of dish soap sitting by the sink that she got for $1.25 at the Dollar Tree. I always figured cheap soap meant I'd be scrubbing twice as long and using triple the amount, so I never bothered trying it. But she handed me a greasy pan from her cast iron skillet and that stuff cut through the bacon grease in about four seconds flat, no joke. I stood there kind of annoyed because I've been paying almost $6 a bottle for the fancy stuff for probably three years now. She said she's been using it since 2019 and her hands don't crack like they did with the name brand she used to buy. I went home and grabbed a bottle myself and honestly the bubbles last just as long in the sink. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I've been getting played by nice packaging this whole time. Anyone else switch to the cheap stuff and actually stick with it, or did you go back after a week?
The part about her hands not cracking is the piece most people skip over. My aunt in Broken Arrow had the same thing happen, she switched off the blue Dawn because her knuckles were splitting open every winter, and the cheap stuff fixed it in one season. Here's the thing nobody talks about though, a lot of the store brand soap is made in the same plants as the name brand, they just run it on a different line and slap a different label on it. You're paying for the label and the shelf spot at eye level, not for some secret recipe. The catch is the dollar store version sometimes waters it down over time, so if a bottle suddenly seems thin, it's not you, it's them cutting costs. That said, at a buck twenty five, buy two and you're still way ahead.