When Summer Mills visited her local CVS drugstore recently, to save a few dollars she bought the store-brand facial scrub rather than the Oil of Olay version she normally uses.

''I thought I'd be able to tell the difference, but I couldn't -- I looked at the ingredients and they seemed almost the same,'' says 30-year-old Mills, a stay-at-home mother of two in Ardmore, Okla. On her next shopping trip, ``I'm going to buy the store-brand moisturizer and cleanser -- it's less money.''

Many Americans are changing their everyday purchases and abandoning brand loyalty, prompted by the persistent financial pressure of rising food, gasoline and electricity prices. From coloring hair at home instead of at the salon to trying cheaper laundry detergents, new evidence indicates that Americans are modifying even minor household habits to save money.

Kimberly-Clark Corp. Chief Executive Thomas Falk noted that sales of the company's potty-training pants, once one of the biggest sales-growth products in the baby aisle, have fallen off in recent months. ''You're seeing consumers leaving children in diapers longer . . . the diaper is less expensive per piece than a training pant,'' he said in a conference call in which he announced a 9 percent decline in third-quarter earnings.

Shoppers are even buying toilet paper differently. ''When they get to the end of the month, and they're out of paycheck, they may buy a smaller-count pack,'' Falk said. Retailers are also sensing more shopper experimentation, and some supermarkets note that sales of their store brands are on the rise.

To be sure, overall sales of name-brand goods are still higher than those of store brands. Still, about 40 percent of primary household shoppers said they started buying store-brand paper products because ''they are cheaper than national brands,'' according to a September report by market-research company Mintel International, which interviewed 3,000 consumers. Nearly 25 percent of respondents reported that it is ''really hard to tell the difference'' between national brands and store brands of paper products. Store brands on average cost 46 percent less than name-brand versions, Mintel found.

Paper napkins suffered the steepest declines over the past year, followed by facial tissue and paper towels. Laundry habits are changing, too. Early signs indicate shoppers are switching to cheaper detergents and softeners, a rare shift in one of the most brand-loyal product categories.

Sales of private-label detergent rose 12 percent over the 52 weeks ended Sept. 6, to $189 million, according to market-data company Information Resources. Lower-priced brand names are posting gains, too.

The estimated retail sales of value-oriented Purex fabric softener, owned by Henkel AG, rose more than 60 percent over the past six months, the company says. ''We view the economic slowdown as an opportunity for our brand,'' says Greg Tipsord, senior vice president of Henkel's U.S. laundry care. ``It's causing the consumer to rethink what had become a habit.''

To win over shoppers, Purex has tried to keep the price of its detergent and fabric softener roughly 50 percent or more below the price of competing premium brands, says Tipsord.

Though low-income consumers have been cutting back for the past several months, now upper-income shoppers -- those with household incomes of $100,000 or more -- also are making changes, according to a new survey by Information Resources.

The report, titled Shopper in Crisis, found that 41 percent of upper-income consumers reduced spending on nonessential groceries, and a fourth of these consumers said they gave up favorite brands over six months in 2008. Nearly one-third of high-income shoppers said they bought more private-label products during the second quarter, up from about 20 percent in the first quarter of this year.

''This isn't belt-tightening; it's belt-notching,'' says Thom Blischok, president of consulting and innovation for Information Resources. ``These ritual changes are much deeper and happening much faster than we expected.''

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