Consumer Reports regularily rates Behr as a "Best Buy", but that's not because it's an excellent paint, it's just because it's probably the best paint you can buy for $18 per gallon.

You'll notice that most hardware store chain paints (like Lowe's "American Tradition" paint, Ace Hardware's "Beautitone" paints and the Behr paint sold at Home Depot all tend to get high ratings on Consumer Reports, and the reason is simple:

Whan a chain of hardware stores decides to sell their own brand of in-house paints, the approach a variety of paint companies to supply them with paint.

Now, a gallon of paint can cost anywhere from $10 to $40 to make, and so someone has to decide what level of quality the paint should be. The hardware store chain looks at it's customer profile and gets customers to fill out questionaires, and in the end figures most of it's customers want a "Buick" quality paint instead of a "Cadillac" or a "Rolls Royce" or a "Lada" paint. And, they figure each of their 1700 stores across North America will sell 30 gallons of paint per day on average.

So, the hardware store chain asks a half dozen paint companies to quote them a price for a upper mid-level quality paint that'll cost $20 (say) per gallon to make, and sell for $32 (say). Each paint company sharpens it's pencils and figures out what binder resin, pigments and additives package they can put in the gallon and still meet that $20 per gallon cost to make.

But, when they start working out the cost to supply 1.5 million gallons of paint per month, all of the price breaks that arise from buying the materials in large quantities figure into the math and end up going into the paint as a better quality binder resin, better quality pigments and/or better additives to make the paint spatter less, spread more smoothly, dry harder, last longer in storage, not be damaged if it freezes, etc.

That is, the volume discount that normally goes to the store chain for buying in large quanitity ends up going into the paint as better quality materials cuz the cost of manufacture has already been established.

And, this is the reason why the in-house paints sold by the big chain stores in the USA like Home Depot, Lowes, Menards, Sears, etc. typically get high ratings from Consumer Reports.

That doesn't mean they're the best paints you can get, it means they're better than one would expect FOR WHAT THEY COST.

And, now you know why.