"Originally, the ads were very generic," said John W. Johnson, chairman of the partnership and C.E.O. of the San Diego Urban League.
"I'm against the generic," said Mr. Bell, who envisions as many building types as there are migrant communities.
"If your business exists only as a dot-com, it's already generic," said Ms. Goodgold, the chief executive of the Nuancing Group, a brand consulting firm in San Diego.
"The doctor asked if I wanted to substitute for the generic," said Ms. Viana, who was buying the $1.45 bottle of generic medicine at her local Droga Raia drugstore in the residential neighborhood of Sumare.
"The average Italian doesn't know what a spread is or the difference between a bund and a bond; their understanding tends to be generic," said Nicola Cacace, an economist and the president of Onesis, a consulting firm.
"It's much better than it was in the '90s, before these drugs started going generic," said Dr. Steven B. Miller, chief medical officer for Express Scripts, another company that manages drug benefit plans.
"There is a debate in the industry about whether you want to live and die by a diet's fortunes, or if you want to stay more generic," said John S. Glass, a restaurant analyst at CIBC World Markets in Boston.
"These plans are impersonal and generic," said one of the disappointed, Debra Brown Steinberg, a lawyer with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft who has donated her time to represent many victims' families.
"I think there is a failure of leadership, and it is generic," said Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the powerful County Board of Supervisors and a 25-year veteran of city politics.
Xopenex is currently priced at about $1.39 per dose versus $0.7 cents a dose for a generic, says analyst LeCroy.
