Why does Glidden Paint suck so bad?

Answer 1

Below is one answer: First Glidden doesn't suck, depending which line you bought in the past you may have bought a lower quality Glidden line. Today however Glidden is only put on higher quality paint lines... Here's the real reason behind the lower priced products in Home Depot. When you consider that the paint company doesn't have any associated cost with selling paint inside Home Depot it becomes much easier to understand the cost behind paint at Home Depot. Glidden and Behr both sell paint to Home Depot and Home Depot picks up the costs of mixing paint. While stores like Sherwin Williams and Ben Moore have to pay for the power, machines and labor. Home Depot defrays these costs by selling other non paint related items. Think about when you buy groceries in Wal-Mart vs. the grocery store. Wal-Mart can sell the exact same items for less because 1) they buy in higher volumes 2) they sell other items with higher margins to make up for the loss of potential profit. Same ideals apply to Paint inside Home Depot. While Home Depot sells paint for less than Specialy Paint stores they sell tons of other items to make up the difference. Independent testing facilities rate Glidden as high if not higher than just about every paint above its price point. While you see the Glidden brand on Home Depot shelves consider that both SW and BM do the same thing but don't put their name on it. Walk in to Wal-Mart or Ace and ask who makes their paint. Wal-Mart mostly SW and Ace is BM, so how do they do it? Same way Home Depot does!

It's price point paint, especially if you buy it from Home Depot. But Glidden has reformulated their entire line at Home Depot with what they say is superior quality. I think it's replacing the entire Evermore line.

Paint contains a lot of things--resins to make it stick to the wall, pigments to give it color, liquids to make it spreadable. The resins are the most expensive part, then the pigments and finally the liquids. If good durable resins cost $10 for enough to make a gallon of paint, pigments cost $8 and liquids cost $6, plus $15 for all the things that go into delivering a gallon of paint to a store's loading dock (paying for the factory, salaries, freight costs, energy, taxes, profit, everything...) the store has to pay $39 for that gallon of paint. Stores have expenses of their own, and of course no one should be expected to sell things for no profit, so let's tack $11 onto that gallon and say it costs $50. In exchange for your $50, you will receive a paint that's so tough nothing will damage it. People line up around the corner to get it.

Home Depot says no. They say their customers don't want a $50 paint, they want a $20 paint...and Home Depot wants paint delivered to their loading dock for $16 per gallon. Now do the numbers: if we make paint as good as we sell to paint specialty stores and sell it to Home Depot for $16 per gallon, we're going to have to eat $8 worth of materials for every gallon we sell...and Home Depot sells an unbelievable amount of paint. It's one of the most popular products they sell, which explains in part why the paint department is always in the most prestigious place in the building--right in the middle of the front row of aisles. Unless we want to donate money to the Home Depot for the privilege of selling at their stores, we are simply going to have to use lower-quality ingredients and much less of them.

And with that, not all Glidden paint is crap. If you go to an independently owned store you can get Glidden Spred paint, which has been around half of forever. If you were to open a can of Spred and set it next to a can of Evermore, you'd be shocked: Spred is much thicker than Evermore, and in paint thick is better. I've actually seen people who grew up on cheap paint put water in Spred--they think it's a paint concentrate. "It's not supposed to be thick like this." Well...yes it is.

Given that, I still tend to stay away from Glidden paint...I like Benjamin Moore a lot. Sherwin-Williams is also good, and I hope now that Glidden's parent company belongs to Akzo Nobel, they bring Sikkens interior paint into the US. I used it in Germany, and it's extremely thick--almost like painting with drywall mud.

The big push in comsumer paints seems to be the "thick as mayonaise" product. One coat coverage with this stuff is virtually assured regardless of how much cost is avoided by the consumer on application tools.

I recently purchased some Glidden exterior flat paint at the Home Depot and upon opening the can I wondered whether the product had been frozen due to the consistency. (I used to work in a Kelly-Moore Paints manufacturing plant.)

In the state it is in upon purchse, I would gaurentee 1 coat coverage with the cheapest of brushes and rollers, however, cutting an edge with a brush gives a huge messy bead. Most consumers wipe 75% of the paint off of their brush before attempting to paint and would never notice this effect.

I would up cutting it 10% with water to make it quickly brushable on rough hewn wood. The product is designed for the weekender. Thinning would also be necessary to evenly spray it.