Wal-Mart batteries are made by johnson controls, the worlds biggest lead acid battery manufacturer. Brand name means nothing anymore, alot of house name batteries are probly made on the same line as the ever-starts. Major conglomorates own everything these days, you cant go by brand names anymore, just like everyone thinks redwings and carhartts are all still american made(they arent, only a small few are )
I have had worse luck with interstates than I have had with ever-starts, the only dif is I paid way more for the interstates
What he says is just the way it is, sadly.
Also,
For most of my many years, our tire-shop that we still have and the filling station we ran for many years before sold batteries to the public.
I can honestly say that we never made a cent of real profit from battery sales; not one nickel; batteries are sold more as a convenience to customers than as a profit item.
Believe it or not, people LIE and abuse the warranties.
If we sold three batteries, you could count on two of those coming back once, and one of those two coming back twice; usually, nothing at all was wrong with any of them.
We had customers that owned fifteen vehicles and only one decent battery, swapping it from one junker to the next.
Starters, cables, alternators, key-switches, whatever, would be the real culprit, yet the customer always blamed the battery first and was not happy until we gave them another new one to take back home and abuse.
Were it up to me, we would have quit selling batteries back when I was just out of diapers; thank goodness, installing them in newer vehicles got so complicated that my father finally quit selling batteries.
All of that being said, if batteries were not warrantied at all, and the seller was not expected to install them, top of the line Group-31s would sell for less than thirty-bucks and a lot of the lesser car batteries would be less than ten-dollars.
For the last several years, even long before we quit handling them, I have been using "blems" with a 90-day warranty, Group-31s costing me about $38 apiece.
I have had as good service from the blems as I ever got from the full cost ones.