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In pursuit of a long-sleeved, orange t-shirt last month, I found myself browsing the apparel offerings at Walmart.com. While they didn’t have what I wanted, Wal-Mart did have available a bunch of sports and fitness apparel under the Starter brand.

I remembered that Starter was something of a storied apparel brand in the early 1990s, with major licensing deals with collegiate and professional sports teams and leagues. A Starter jacket with your favorite team logo on it was something of a status symbol. My immediate thought was that Starter must have hit rock bottom if it was being sold now at Wal-Mart.

A little bit of research revealed that Starter, in fact, had lost its position at the top of the sports-apparel heap some time ago. The company was bought and sold a number of times in the last decade, and so the current distribution arrangement with Wal-Mart appears to be a brand resurrection.

I’m not so interested in the history of Starter, but I am interested in hypothesizing on consumer perception of brands sold in a discount mass merchant. My theory: By distributing in Wal-Mart, Starter has relegated itself to something that is the opposite of its once cool status. By choosing to sell in Wal-Mart, the current owners of the Starter brand have established their property as a discount brand that would be hard pressed to reclaim its position as a fashionable sports brand.

I’m sure the same can’t be said for every brand in every product category. You can buy an iPhone at Wal-Mart, but nobody thinks Apple has become a bargain brand. The same holds true for any number of food or hard good products.

But clothes are different. Fashion-conscious consumers know that Wal-Mart isn’t the place to shop prestige brands. As such, you won’t find Brooks Brothers looking to place sweater vests on Wal-Mart racks.

But has Wal-Mart ever killed a brand in this way? Starter doesn’t quite fit this model, since it toppled well before appearing alongside Wal-Mart’s discount brand apparel lines. Has there been a once revered product that became diluted by its placement on Wal-Mart’s uncool shelves?

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