Of course it's a regional thing. There's many examples from around the world. For many in Britain "hoover" is synonymous with vacuum cleaners, and "tannoy' for loud speaker / public address system.
In hungary the brand name of KUKA (of orange robot arm fame) become genericized to mean any kind of trash bin. I heard it happened because they produced the first widely used garbage trucks in Hungary and they had their brand name written on the trucks (or perhaps even on the garbage cans, depending on where you read the story). So much so that the garbage trucks are called “kukás autó”, and the profession of garbage collection itself is just called “kukás”.
