I noticed Dollar General and Family Dollar were still selling the 15 watt and 25 watt incandescent GE bulbs in twin packs. Just recently though, they’ve been replaced by LED snow cone equivalents in a single pack. The higher wattage incandescents are still available.

Also, Dollar Tree has started stocking some GE incandescent bulbs, including the 250 watt 3 way bulbs.

Last weekend I went to Tractor Supply and most of the GE bulbs were on clearance, including 3 way LEDs and 70 W Lucalox, among others. I wonder if they will stock a different brand soon.

All the modern incandescent bulbs with the two brand names are imported by other companies in China. They aren’t the same as they used to and they are not necessarily higher quality than the cheap Chinese bulb. GE faced the same fate as Sylvania did. The last General Electric incandescent and fluorescent light bulb factory in Ohio closed in 2023, and the Hungarian GE plant was given back to Tungsram in 2018 and Tungsram went out of business in 2022. That’s why everything labeled GE says “manufactured for GE lighting”, GE does not make them. In fact, GE has been removing the GE name from more of their products. GE current is now just current, their professional light bulb site is just LED.com. They replaced the “GE’s best incandescent lighting line” with “our best incandescent lighting line”. GE has also lately been seeing bulbs without any logo on the box.

GE does not make light bulbs anymore, nor does Sylvania.

Also, the 15s and the 25s are exempt and are not banned until at least 2028 (this new act could potentially ban low wattage incandescents). I guess, they are going LED now. I have not read online about it now have I’ve seen GE 25W equivalent LEDs in the A19 shape. Everything I find is incandescent.

Sylvania faced the same fate around 2020, their light bulb plants closed, and everything began getting imported by other companies. At the same time, in 2020, Savent got GE, but it didn’t start out as disastrous until more recently (around 2023 is when it started). Even the quality of the GE LEDs is going down. Everything GE is downhill. Anything fluorescent, incandescent, or HID from GE now is terrible quality, as well as any of the el cheapo GE LEDs or their all glass style bulbs. During COVID was when all the lighting manufacturers became getting worse and worse in quality, and it has never stopped since. The only decent thing GE still makes is their reflector LEDs and the 15,000 hour snow cone bulbs, and the quality even on those is going down.

Sylvania seems to be better with the glass LEDs than GE but their low end stuff is awful and is much worse than the GE equivalents. All the latest Sylvania traditional sources (incandescent, fluorescent, HID) are not good quality either. Sylvania seems to have better quality control with the latest fluorescents than GE (they go mercury starved less often).