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Good to know. But to be honest, I'll likely still just be a big box home repair person. I'm SINK, so the only 'wear and tear ' on anything here is from me. And as long as I don't get THE. absolute. cheapest .thing. I think I'll be fine. I'm now living in the 48 year old house I grew up in -- with siblings, parents and whoever else was here at any given time -- and we're only on our second AC unit and furnace, first replacement windows, and second faucets in the kitchen and each bath.
Now, maybe even builder grade decades ago is better than some of the true junk out there today. I don't know. I personally I haven't found that buying faucets at a big box store is that big a deal. Again, I don't get THE cheapest. But I'm not going to by a high end Grohe or Rohl Perrin & Rowe either. (Brands I never heard of until I looked them up for this post.)
Did you know that name-brand plumbing fixtures at Home Depot/Lowes are made with plastic parts, while the same fixtures sold through a plumbing supplier are made with metal parts?
They do it to have a lower price, but big box plumbing fixtures require more repairs.
I'll just squash this right now-
They are NOT the same fixture. They may look similar but they are not the same- Same would imply an exact duplicate; having the same UPC number- they do not!
So, before you think the big box stores are pulling a fast one- they're not. They go to manufacturers asking for a "similar" product in a particular price point. If the manufacturer wants to do business with the big box stores, they accommodate their wishes because volume talks over quality.
I dunno, call me crazy but I think the OP probably figured that people would assume that two fixtures that LOOK exactly alike might be "the same fixture." Of course they're not "the same" which is the point of the OP. But people need to realize that when they are comparing price, they're not comparing the same quality or workmanship, or even "the same fixture" when they're comparing something at a big box store with something from a distributor that specializes in quality fixtures. Even if they do look the same.
This reminds me of when we bought a Vizio TV ten years ago. We bought ours from an appliance store and paid about $1200 for it. My step son thought we had been taken advantage of because his mom had recently bought "the same TV" - that is, a TV made by the same company with the same screen size, in a frame that looked the same, for $999 at WalMart. We had to explain to him the difference in pixel size, components, etc and how Vizio made that lower end (quality wise) model of TV specifically for WalMart, to sell at that low price point, and that it is NOT "the same" as the one we bought.
Ten years later, that TV in our house is still going strong. His mom's TV has already been replaced - most likely with another $999 WalMart model. So who paid more in the long run?
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