comfort and joy

I strongly recommend looking away now if you are of a delicate constitution. This is going to be a rant of a feminine nature.
Basically, I've been trying to find ways of cutting back on the amount of money I spend, and one of the things I've been doing is trying to get out of the habit of buying branded products just because I'm used to them. In many areas this has worked out fine, but then I went and bought own-brand tampons. "How different can they be?" I thought. Very, as it turns out. Surely this is a product which ought to be designed to cause the minimum amount of fuss and the maximum of comfort. It seems however that this is one area where it's worth spendng a bit of extra cash as, unfortunately, a certain supermarket apparently thinks that what women really want is to be stabbed in the lady garden with a pointy piece of cardboard several times a day.