[daktah]

yesterday i went to get some plugs from the oreilly down the street, some ngk tr5gp's. i got 8 (duh), 4 in separates and 4 in a set. when i got home i took them all out and was about to install them when i noticed that some of them had faded ink on the ceramic and awful roll stamping quality on the body. i looked closer and noticed there were exactly 4 that were ugly and 4 that were perfect. suspicious, i looked a little closer and saw that even the electrodes were different.
if you look in the pictures there is a used genuine, new genuine, and fake (in that order) youll see that on the 2 genuines only the finewire electrode pokes past the ceramic, but on the fake the whole cone shape does with very little finewire at the end of it. and yes i know its hard to make that out on the used plug, but just trust me that in person it looks exactly the same as the new genuine just missing some length on the finewire. i decided that if these werent fake they were at least a crappy lot and i didnt want them.
but as i was picking the boxes out of the trash i noticed that, "coincidentally", half of them were a different size and of a lower print quality if you look closely enough (all of the art and colors are noticeably more dull, and if you have good eyes youll see the gradient in the background is worse). if these arent knockoffs i dont know what are. i put them back in their boxes, went back to the store, explained it to the guy (who expectedly didnt seem to care) and bought some tr6ix's that came in a pair of sets, after checking out a few from each box of course.
has this happened to anyone before, especially recently? do you guys agree these were fake plugs or just a crap lot?