are brakes from retail chains worth it?

Pads and rotors are fairly basic and hard to screw up , they may ask if you want hard or soft pads , or maybe a medium . I stay away from hard pads as it may cause squealing brakes . Honda uses set screws on their rotors that can be hard to get out as the heat sets them up ,I thought about bolting a rotor on backwards to pin a phillips bit against the screw so that it can't strip , never tried it .

Napa SS and SG brake pads are pretty good. They don't squeal and are backed by a "Customer Satisfaction" warranty. I work for a local Napa store and one of my jobs is processing defects. We don't get too many of those pads back defective. Napa rotors are pretty good too. Again, not many come back defective. Hope that helps! Jim

When I had my shop I always used NAPA brake parts, it was very rare that anything came back due to manufacturing defects and if they did the store always covered the warranty.

Asbestos in brake pads is no longer used in the US.