> Why would anyone spend thousands of dollars on a Prada handbag, an Armani suit, or a Rolex watch? If you really need to know the time, buy a cheap Timex or just look at your phone and send the money you have saved to Oxfam.
One issue is there's a kind of missing middle in many goods markets. There's cheap shit, and overpriced "luxury" signaling goods that may or may not be much better. Personally I often find sorting the actually-good from the faux-good on the (lower end of the) luxury side, then catching it used or on sale, easier than trying to find then assess the quality of mid-level products (if they exist at all—often they do not) or suss out unusually good cheap products.
So far as signaling goes, until people stop being biased in favor of folks who look well-off (or at least "proper" for whatever setting), even when they think they're not, that won't stop being a thing worth considering.
EDIT: nb. there's a lot more to this article, for those who haven't read it yet, and I'm in no way intending to dismiss it.
That's one of the great things about a good subreddit. A good subreddit, for me, often ends up helping me to know how to spend a reasonable amount of money in that area and come away with high-quality products.
I have been lurking on r/chainsaw, r/budgetaudiophile, and others for a while. I was quite comfortable buying a $400 chainsaw, knowing what I was getting that I wouldn't find in a $200 saw, and what I didn't need in a $600 saw. The same goes for the $130 pair of speakers I just bought. I had no idea what to get from looking at Amazon, but a little time reading r/budgetaudiophile led me to an affordable pair of speakers that gave me the best listening experience I've had in decades.
I'd be careful here, you have to _very_ carefully assess the domain of the subreddit visitors. My own anecdotes:
r/miata - Useless for the entire subgroup that takes their car to the track, and will very likely still give advice, it'll just be bad or outright dangerous.
r/cigars - Totally jump on bandwagons, and generally are "new" to the world of cigars.
To highlight another point, a lot of more niche subs largely cater to those new to the niche. Those are the same people commenting and giving others advice, whether they really have the knowledge to or not. This mechanism over a few months seems to turn everything into an echo chamber, and you end up with new people jumping onto a bandwagon without enough info.
Same goes for Amazon reviews, to a large degree - That $50 set of sockets might be great for someone who wants to change their oil filter, but will literally shatter for someone doing more involved work.
I think this is where the traditional forums are much better. I want my info from "serious" people who hang around the community for years, not from someone who came into it a few weeks ago, and really just want some upvotes/points/whatever.
Oh, absolutely. People occasionally post videos demonstrating really unsafe chainsaw operation, or demonstrating really inexperienced operation. Those videos are quickly downvoted, or even better dissected for what the person is doing wrong and how they could improve. Same goes for the audio subs, and r/motorcycles...
I find it easier to sort out on a subreddit who's an experienced, knowledgeable person, who's inexperienced, and who's a shill. I can sort that out on Amazon reviews, but I have to do that on my own each time. In a good subreddit, the community is doing that, both participants and moderators. You do have to keep an eye out for poorly-moderated or overly-shilled subs.
I think almost as a rule reddit has a really shallow level of expertise in any subreddit topic. I get really skeptical if someone recommends a subreddit as an authoritative community.
I've found decent success with /r/MechanicalKeyboards/ and a good chunk of the "classy" liquor subreddits (i.e. /r/scotch et all) since you tend to have a number or regulars who you can pick up a fairly solid taste from (how close they are to your own tastes) and can pretty reliably make decisions off of that.
I wasn't going to say anything here, but MechanicalKeyboards is IME the absolute worst--it's an impenetrable echo chamber for keyboard OCDism, and I say that as someone who owns several mechanical keyboards and has nerded out in more than a few related categories.
I'm not going to deny that but if you just filter for content that your goal from the subreddit like I mentioned in my comment then you can pick up some meaningful information and have some good discussions. MK is such a wide field for discussion and of course there are going to be OCD elitists but there are also a lot of people who are just going for ergonomics or function. As long as you keep that in mind and just ignore the posts that don't serve your interest in the subreddit then you'll have a good time.
r/cigars was sadly gutted after reddit banned trades on their platform. Pre ban it was probably the best general purpose cigar forum on the internet, it's essentially turned into instagram for cigars nowadays which is a real shame given what it once was.
Yes, I've seen that evolutionary decline in other subs as well. There seems to be a general increase in photo-based submissions, and fewer substantial discussions. People seem to think the photos will inspire discussion, but they often inspire only minimal discussion.
Chainsaws are one thing you do want to spend money on and buy the best. Most of the cheaper homeowner saws are, in my opinion, unsafe garbage that should just be tossed. Especially for somebody that doesn't use a saw all the time. A heavier saw with more distance between the handgrips is going to be easier to control and kick back less if you do get in trouble, and that's one of the biggest ways people get hurt. Or if you try to do something that the saw isn't big enough to handle, which is another thing that people do all too often. You can still find some of the cheapest trash that don't even have chain brakes...
If you buy a Husqvarna 372 or a Stihl 441, you'll probably never need to buy another saw in your lifetime. I prefer the Husky 372 (and older models like the 262 and 288), because it has a separate on/off switch and choke, whereas most saws have a one-piece switch/choke, with an off, on, and choke position - if it's cold and I've got gloves on, it's too easy to flip the lever down too far when starting, and shut Stihls and the cheaper Huskies off.
Oh this, a thousand times. I took a job where I had to do office casual dress for the first time (I had a nice run) and there’s these great series of “your favorite ___ for ___“ posts. People breaking down in price tiers what & why they like stuff, it’s such a fantastic resource.
Hmm... interesting, these are half the price for pretty much the same specs as my last (and regrettably expired) ones. How are they in practice? The reviews I looked at say that they lack in the highs a little.
I've only had them for a couple days, and I haven't listened carefully to many speakers in a long time, or ever really. So I can't really say too much specifically, other than they sound significantly better than anything I've listened to in the last decade. There's nothing more I'm wishing from them at the moment.
> One issue is there's a kind of missing middle in many goods markets.
I agree. It's gotten worse in every area from clothes to shoes to furniture to accessories since cheap shit started flooding the market.
For example, I usually try to be as frugal as I can with clothes, but that means trying to sort out a few good ones from the pile of polyester crap that sheds microplastic every time you wash them. It's such a waste of time that nowadays I just move up to the next price bracket where most products are made of real wool and/or cotton. I can easily see why someone who is comfortable with shelling out even more money will choose to ignore all the consumer brands and go straight to high-end brands that are guaranteed to be good.
Watches are a whole different game, though. There are plenty of good products in nearly every price range. Bill Gates seems happy with his $40 Casio Duro.
> It's such a waste of time that nowadays I just move up to the next price bracket where most products are made of real wool and/or cotton.
Yeah, I found my sizing in a couple decent-ish brands that hardly deal in synthetic fabrics at all, and just buy them during seasonal sales (on their websites) or at thrift stores. Shoes? Seconds and ebay. $9 for a thrifted button-up that's $80 new ($45 on sale), looks & fits nicer than something from Target or The Gap or whatever, and will actually hold up for a few years (in a rotation) ain't bad at all. Sale prices are nearly as low as normal prices on much worse clothes. Saves money for the occasional splurge item for stuff that's hard to thrift or get used (jackets and suits are tough), and even with a few of those my wardrobe looks similar to someone who's spending 3-4x what I am on clothes but being less frugal about it. But it definitely took a lot of up-front effort (research, finding sizing, a few full-price items or gambles on stuff on ebay to get all that dialed in) to get to this point.
> trying to find then assess the quality of mid-level products
People have done this work for you and the market is the indicator. The better item is the one that depreciates less, with caveats.
One strategy is to check ebay to see how close second-hand prices are to retail price. It doesn't work with everything -- electronics are especially bad with this indicator -- but pretty good for physical items.
Any crystal Timex will be a fine watch and they are ~$30 to start.
If you buy some fashion watch, who the hell knows what you will get, for who the hell knows how much.
So the quoted paragraph is not a great example of the conundrum you describe, the cheap products work great and a simple selection criteria like "Buy the Timex or Casio you think looks nicer" will be very successful.
It could still be a good example. You know that Timex and Casio are decent purveyors of low-cost watches. You know the difference between a traditional watch brand and a newfangled fashion brand. But someone who is buying a watch for the first time might not. The market is so saturated with cheap crap, and YouTube is full of videos peddling luxury brands. Confused with the apparent polarization, the newbie asks around, and the friendly neighborhood watch enthusiast tells them to get a Tissot or Hamilton instead. Of course that's nowhere near high-end, but they've still paid 10x more unnecessarily.
> Personally I often find sorting the actually-good from the faux-good on the (lower end of the) luxury side, then catching it used or on sale, easier than trying to find then assess the quality of mid-level products (if they exist at all—often they do not) or suss out unusually good cheap products.
There was a time when I trusted Amazon reviews, but the 5-star bots, and now the 1-star griefers, have totally eradicated any trust I have in that system. Amazon's crowdsourced methodology has been corrupted by greed.
Reddit works for now, but I also question the long-term sustainability of Reddit. Popular Reddits are clearly becoming more-and-more visited by shills and marketing teams. This is useful in some Reddits (ex: /r/AMD) for now, since it provides a communication channel to the company. But there's this feeling of astroturfing that I can't shake... a more "malicious" company could very well ruin the careful balance we have.
In the long term, its clear to me that marketing shills will too ruin the Reddit / community methodology. Its impossible to tell who is, or who isn't, a shill. After all, shills simply pretend to be fanboys posting from normal accounts, and they're getting better at it.
In the longer term, I think something old-school, like Consumer Reports, is best. What we really need is a team of trusted 3rd party reviewers, who are independently funded __outside__ of the advertisement system.
Yes, OUTSIDE the advertisement system. So that kills YouTube (yeah, Gamer's Nexus is good but... Steve constantly has to worry about pissing off his advertisers. Same with Linus Tech Tips: they're subservient to the ads whether they like it or not). It also kills most websites, which are reliant upon ad revenue. Its absolutely imperative that your 3rd party review site has the financial independence to be able to issue "negative reviews".
Even newspapers of old are clearly a poor model: as its basically impossible to tell the difference between an "advertisement-article" and an "actual investigative article" upon publishing. And since most old-school newspapers got money from advertisers, there is still a conflict of interest when you start to follow the money.
Consumer Reports is unfortunately stuck in an age-old era. There needs to be a more modernized version, with more recent hardware reviews, better discussion forums, better community engagement, etc. etc. A combination of Reddit-like discussions, but with a core set of trusted reviewers who can lead the community (and who can be trusted to be "non-shills").
Shills and marketers should be welcome to a site: Marketing is not bad in of itself. But they need to be carefully moderated and probably should be publicly noted as an official representative of a company. Policing shills is probably impossible to enforce in the long run, but the prevalence of trusted writers independent of outside finances is the core issue of trust that needs to be built.
> Consumer Reports is unfortunately stuck in an age-old era. There needs to be a more modernized version, with more recent hardware reviews, better discussion forums, better community engagement, etc. etc. A combination of Reddit-like discussions, but with a core set of trusted reviewers who can lead the community (and who can be trusted to be "non-shills").
I disagree. I pay for Consumer Reports and like it the way it is. Keeping comment sections civil is hard and a lot of work, which would distract them from their primary purpose.
> Keeping comment sections civil is hard and a lot of work, which would distract them from their primary purpose.
I think that's a fair point. But paying for forum accounts (ex: SomethingAwful forums) is certainly a possibility.
Before the days of the internet, clubs came-and-went based on "membership dues". The recognition that the members had to pay for the various costs of the community: the space they rented for and meet up in, ongoing expenses of equipment (ex: Yacht Club may have to pay for dock fees), etc. etc.
In a few years, when enough other people understand the importance of 3rd party financial independence, maybe this old-school club methodology (except applied to the internet: to pay for moderators, forum hosting, etc. etc.) could become more mainstream. The time isn't right yet, but I think people are beginning to wake up to the importance of an independent financial stream.
> Consumer Reports is unfortunately stuck in an age-old era. There needs to be a more modernized version, with more recent hardware reviews, better discussion forums, better community engagement, etc. etc. A combination of Reddit-like discussions, but with a core set of trusted reviewers who can lead the community (and who can be trusted to be "non-shills").
I've been trying to build this over the last couple years with productdork.com. It's somewhere between review site and community. For a long time it was just me, but it's at a point where I'm getting a few new commenters each week.
Long-term I'd love to have representatives from brands/manufacturers commenting as well. Maybe have badges to provide context to other members of the community.
On that malicious company note - have you ever considered a replica Eames Lounge? A genuine Eames goes for $5k+ new.
Searching for reviews of replicas, usually around $800-1.5k, will get you a bunch of similar reviews on subs like /r/malelivingspace. There are 2-3 big replica makers but I think the chairs are pretty much the same, cheap Chinese ripoffs with shoddy materials. For some things, you have to become a seasoned gumshoe to figure out if a review is legitimate or not. I assume there are other niche industries that are using similar marketing techniques.
They are beholden with affiliate links. Which means their financial success depends on you buying through their websites.
At a minimum, that means you won't get to learn about smaller niche stores like JetPens.com (very good for stationary / high-quality pens), since such small stores don't have any affiliate links for Wirecutter to make money from.
As old and outdated as Consumer Reports is... they're clearly primarily driven through reader-contributions. There's a degree of independence through that methodology that affiliate links / advertisements / etc. etc. fails to replicate.
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Speaking of which: Jetpens.com, and other smaller niche online stores, do manage to solve the problem to some degree. Their blogposts about their products is certainly "shilling their store", but they review a wide enough variety of products that they've earned my trust. They aren't shilling for any particular company, they're simply shilling for their wares.
I guess smaller webstores really do have that advantage. As long as they have good and useful reviews on their blog ( https://www.jetpens.com/blog ), I'm going to be reading their posts and possibly buying their stuff. Yeah, its shilling their own website, but that's something that most people understand innately when they read the blog.
There's also a quality-level associated with the store brand: JetPens doesn't offer cheap or low-quality pens. You can pretty much buy stuff at random and get good stationary. Careful control of the store's inventory is clearly important to building a brand.
After all, if I wanted cheap stuff, I'd go to Amazon (or Walmart) instead. I'm going to JetPens because I feel like a premium quality pen or pencil.
This seems to suggest they won't recommend a product if they can't make an affiliate deal off of it, which is not the case. Yes, they make money through these links, but I've not seen a case of them not referring to a good product because it is not available on a store they have an affiliate deal with. And if the product is their chosen product and no affiliate deal is there, they link to the brand store or other retailer.
> This seems to suggest they won't recommend a product if they can't make an affiliate deal off of it, which is not the case.
It goes beyond and deeper than that.
Affiliate-based ad-model is beholden to Amazon for revenue. If Amazon launches their own review site (ex: leveraging the Washington Post brand, as a hypothetical), then you can almost be assured that Wirecutter would be killed off. All Amazon has to do is stop paying paid affiliate-links and instead offer review services through Washington Post (and ONLY Washington Post).
We're beyond the point of simply having websites "function". We're at the stage of the internet where we need to consider how to build web-businesses / web-organizations that last for longer than 10 years, even in the face of unknown changes. Too many websites make short-term assumptions (such as "We can trust Amazon to keep giving us money perpetually"), and end up getting swallowed or shut-down as soon as those assumptions fail.
True: Amazon Affiliate links still are a decent source of money. But just two years ago, most people probably thought that Google Adsense money was good enough to be sustainable also. The collapse of the banner-ad money (as money has shifted to Youtube ads instead) has especially hit online sites (especially those without a Youtube presence) extremely hard.
Wirecutter, like Consumer Reports, initially had sterling recommendations. Well-researched, well-tested, and following the reviewer through the process was half the fun.
Lately the reviews I've seen are selecting for what Amazon link will perform for them, rather than truly what product (available via Amazon or other retailers) is the best product or value. I've found their picks frequently have bimodal ratings, with a large chunk of users hating the product.
so far I've only had good or great experiences with stuff I've actually purchased based on their articles. I find the site is great for items where you don't care too much about the category but just want a decent example. I would never buy computer hardware based on a Wirecutter review, but I'll happily buy any kitchen equipment under $50 based on their review alone.
in my reading, most of the Wirecutter recommendations that turn out to be suboptimal suffer from flaws that only surface six months into ownership, far longer than you can reasonably expect a reviewer to test a cheap product.
the one truly dubious article I've read is the "best small saucepan" review where their top pick is a tramontina product. tramontina's line was getting rave reviews from all the cooking sites/communities a couple years ago, but it appears to have gone downhill since they recently switched manufacturers. the article was updated this year, but makes no mention of the current quality discussion...
This coincides with my own impressions: WC article and recommendation quality has nosedived in service of affiliate links and margin-seeking. The "self-care" articles in particular seem a very transparent excuse to push a basket of sort-of irrelevant items that Wirecutter would very much like you to buy today.
I wish it didn't. Life would be much simpler. But it really does.
Wearing different clothes, driving a different car (or not driving a car, riding a bike) has an enormous impact on the impression that you leave on people.
It's not necessarily 'spend more win more'. A fancy car might not ingratiate you with the locals.
Beyond that - I think you have to unpick what is meant by "don't need". If I were restricted to buying things I need, I'd be donating something like 80% of my income to charity.
There are interesting cases - like why someone who really can't afford a particular thing buys it anyway - but usually that sort of thing, in my experience, comes down to a type of stress that has them making suboptimal decisions all over (e.g. if you're poor, everything is harder, because everything is stressful, and...)
It's important to remember that EVERY group uses status signaling.
Those hoodies you wear? You are signaling which tribe you belong to and your status within it. (In particular, this one is called "aposematic signaling", or I-can-get-away-with-it signaling.)
You think you're beyond status by intellectualizing over status signaling? No, instead you're just signaling (via intellectual status) to ingratiate yourself within a tribe that values intellectualism.
I have a fairly intellectual group of friends, and it was a sobering realization for us when we all noticed that - at least in part - the degree to which we share our intellectual curiosities may simply reflect a way to stay "in-group." Should we fail to intellectualize, then we might no longer "fit in" and belong to a tribe.
People signal in different ways - some by bragging, others by refusing to brag, some by buying, some by refusing to buy - but in the end, it's mostly about pledging allegiance to one tribe and rejecting the other in opposition. It's really no different from politics.
Everyone belongs to a tribe, and every tribe has a status hierarchy.
I’ve noticed that how formally you “have” to dress as a woman in corporate IT is an inverse parabola.
Receptionists? Often have strict dress codes demanding skirts and pantyhose.
Actual executives? Pantsuits and high end handbags with matching shoes.
Team assistants (aka, senior secretaries): moderately-priced business casual
Managers? Somewhat more expensive business casual
Developers and engineers like myself who will always be “individual contributors”? Jeans, hiking boots and t-shirts, with accessories and non-hiking ankle boots when feeling fancy.
And that latter definitely carries the status of, “I don’t think I’m judged by my appearance.”
That’s only really true for homogeneous groups. When culturally diverse people get together they rarely agree on what the status symbols are. Think old vs new money at a party. For any given metric say highest status, smartest, strongest, or most attractive person it’s hard to define an absolutely objective criteria.
Precisely! But I would argue that homogeneity (in beliefs, culture, SES) is what defines the tribe.
A heterogenous, divided group would not be a cohesive tribe, and therefore would not have a unifying status hierarchy. Old money and new money are separate tribes, and each status signals to ingroup members in profoundly different ways.
> There are interesting cases - like why someone who really can't afford a particular thing buys it anyway - but usually that sort of thing, in my experience, comes down to a type of stress that has them making suboptimal decisions all over (e.g. if you're poor, everything is harder, because everything is stressful, and...)
In Fussell's Class he diagnoses this as a deeply "middle class" (in terms of socialization, not necessarily income) behavior. Especially if the "luxury" things they're buying but can't afford are also actually kind of bad and not something someone socialized into upper-middle or upper-class attitudes would want (one notable category as an example: just about anything with a conspicuous brand logo on it).
> one notable category as an example: just about anything with a conspicuous brand logo on it
This one in particular grates on me. The company is in effect using you as a billboard. Unfortunately there are some types of products where this is virtually ubiquitous, even at the high end. Cycling gear is a good example.
On the one hand, status signaling is both unfair and error prone, but on the other hand it's understandable. It's merely a way for humans to cope with having limited knowledge. If you're trying to gauge a person socially, you have to work with the data you have on-hand. In a sense, you could even say that making time to improve your external appearance is an act of empathy towards others.
Commenters here seem to be missing his real thesis: we buy these objects because humans believe there are "deeper" properties than just its sensory or signaling value.
One study Bloom performed: people were asked to value a dress shirt in a plastic wrapping that had merely been owned -- never touched -- by a celebrity. The self-assessed value on the mint condition shirt was higher than a regular mint condition shirt -- merely being owned on paper by a celebrity gave it more value. I think about this experiment probably once a month.
I see this happening a lot amongst my friends in the bay area. Now 4-5 years removed from school, everyone paid off there debts and are setting up there adult life. One buys a home, another buys a home the same size or bigger. One buys a tesla, the other buys the one model up. One gets a drone, the other buys a drone the week after. It goes on and on. Most of the time now, meeting with them, discussions are about what they bought or what they plan on buying.
To me it feels like everyone uses the goods they buy to show how important they are. Expensive goods means you are valued in what you do, that's why you can afford it. I break the group mold, driving a corolla, living in a rental mostly because I want to save my money for other goals but sometimes I do feel the pang to buy one of the newly announced toys so I can go to a meet up and show it off.
Another way to look at it -- your friends are very close in age and class, exposed to the same things, and likely going through the same life stages together. We are all less different than we'd like to believe.
But I'm a unique, rugged individual whose whose deepest desires and life-perspective are my own! Don't spout your collectivist socialist propaganda in my direction!
Nah. It's not hard. Just don't buy stuff you don't need. Good ad blocking helps, too.
I know a couple who were way too much into bling. They blew through $15 million and ended up in crap jobs. The wife once told me I should get a Rolex. I said "Why?".
There are many people who have money but don't show it. Read "The Millionaire Next Door".
> There are many people who have money but don't show it.
You could attribute that to humility or good manners, but you could also attribute it to the fact that their persona is good enough of a signal that they don't need to add another signal.
This is especially true of traditional nobility and the super-rich. It doesn't matter whether Bill Gates wears a $40 watch or a $40K watch because everyone already knows that he's one of the richest guys in the world. Marie Antoinette wore diamonds not because she felt a need to demonstrate her status and power, but because she liked diamonds and happened to have the status and power to get them.
However if you appreciate a fine watch that does more than tell the time (and who's to dissect the whys and wherefores?) buy it and support the families of the workers who are part of the company that produce it. Someone sweeps the floor in their workshops and needs the job. Ditto all the other luxury goods.
Why workers producing goods that exclusively go to benefit the upper class be considered a good thing?
If there were no idle rich to make expensive products for, (say they were all beamed off the planet to work in an alien slave mining facility) the end product that was produced from any job would defacto have to help those in the same or lower class of the worker, benefiting everyone.
In other words, what's better for the world, yet another rich man's yacht, or cheaper, better tasting loaf of bread that a poor person can buy and eat?
That was his previous watch. Gates apparently upgraded to a slightly more expensive watch last year.
Buying a $20 watch will support some Chinese workers. Buying a $2K watch will support Japanese or Swiss workers. But I don't think buying a $20K watch will support workers any more than a $2K watch does. It probably depends on the company and the watch, but I think it's a safe bet that most of the markup at the extreme high end of the spectrum goes to a small number of managers and dealers.
Ordering an expensive watch straight from a known master is one option, they usually don't spend a lot of money on managers, dealers or even advertising. For 20k you've got plenty options. The only downside is that selling your generic-but-good-quality rolex is easy and repairing/maintenance can be done everywhere while things with small brands can sometimes be more complicated.
Designing and making a mechanical watch with many complications takes a lot of time, so it's entirely possible to buy even a 200k watch where you are mostly paying for the actual labor (of a high-skilled professional/artist).
2K watches are made mostly by machines. 20K is where you start having a substantial part of the cost being handmade finishes. The dealers cut is similar in percentage.
People like to buy luxury products based on their perceived status signalling, not actual quality. If it lets you Keep Up With The Joneses, it's perfect.
It's simply a matter of people wanting to live (or imply that they live) a lifestyle that is beyond their means, because living a lavish lifestyle is a indicator of success in life, thanks to our consumerism-based society.
One interesting nugget from the article: “Surfer dudes don’t compete with Star Trek geeks for status”. The point being that signaling is often very local, restricted to your social or interest group.
I actually think its a great mechanism for wealth redistribution.
Imagine the following scenario:
Both Person A and Person B want a watch and will both consume one. Person A is very rich and Person B is lower or middle income. Assume Watch 1 and Watch 2 are made in the exact same factory. Watch 1 has artistic elements and is marked up 300% with 200% on making nicer packaging, manual, ad editorials, social media marketing, display case design, sales commissions with the profits left to the factory owner. Watch 2 is sold at a discount retailer. Person A buys Watch 1 and Person B buys Watch 2.
Person A has had generally the same level (maybe slightly higher) environmental impact. But in the process Person A has also enabled many knowledge/creative workers who might otherwise have been under employed to derive a source of revenue (and possibly a purpose). Basically its a pre-commissioned objet d'art that can be mass produced and can be purchased by the masses.
Where it somewhat falls apart is if the marketing is so good that Person B buys Watch 1 and goes into debt in the process.
More likely than not, though, Person A owns the watch company and puts the profits in an offshore tax Haven or uses them for stock buybacks, while keeping the R&D budget flatlined.
Honestly what choice do I have. I'm not particularly attractive. So I buy nice clothes to look the part. And take flak for it from family lol. They're not even that expensive. I'm talking 300 eur jackets. It doesn't matter much but I believe it does help. If it matters even once that I don't dress like a hobo it's a big win for me. But you know what baffles me out of prada bags, Rolex and Armani? Armani suits. To an outside observer they look like every other suit.
To an outside observer they look like every other suit.
That depends on the observer, no? I certainly couldn’t tell a Prada handbag from any other sort of handbags but I’m not the target audience, women buy expensive handbags and shoes to impress other women, in particular other women who are also into handbags and shoes. Similarly men who wear Armani suits are signalling to other suit-wearers, Rolex watches are a signal to watch fans, and so on.
In Geneva it is easy to walk down the street and see watches selling for prices that vary by over 4 orders of magnitude.
They all keep pretty good time. Some of the cheaper digital ones have much more functionality than the expensive mechanical ones. It's clear that keeping time is not the purpose of the watch.
Correct. If you're looking for the most accurate timekeeper, well, you already have it, it's your phone.
I got into watches because the engineering of the watch is amazing and beautiful. The fact that someone could design a series of gears and springs that correctly identifies not only the time but the day - including 31 day months and leap years - is astonishing to me.
There's an important factor here — Some of these things have intrinsic value to the owner, and the social signalling can actually be undesirable (in that you don't want to be associated with the group of people that ordinarily use that item as a status symbol)
I currently use a smartwatch, but before that I had a cheap Seiko automatic watch. The whole point of buying that watch was precisely that having an automatic (self-winding) mechanic watch on my wrist makes me the geek inside me a tiny bit happier, because how freaking cool is an automatic watch?
I would've been willing to pay a fair bit more money for a fancier, more precise (i.e. MORE GEARS!!!) watch over what I got, but I specifically did _not_ want a showy "I'm a rich prick" watch, and there's just a vanishingly small number of watches in that segment.
Seiko itself makes very high-end watches, especially under the 'Grand Seiko' moniker, some of which are as expensive as the well-known ones from the Swiss manufacturers, but at the same time incredibly understated unless you're really into the matter.
This can be a branding/marketing claim in itself, of course. There's an origin story around their Spring Drive mechanism that goes something like a lonely engineer-genius tinkering on it for 30 years until he had it perfected (don't quote me on that). In that way, Seiko appeals to the 'Japanese artisan/craftsmanship geek' who consciously chooses the non-mainstream brand. Not sure if that is intentional marketing or truly authentic company identity.
I had the same instinct as you but quickly realized that almost nobody notices most fancy watches unless they're also a collector. Also showiness is often unrelated to price - lots of showy watches are really cheap [0], and some of the most understated are very expensive [1].
I've actually found that not wearing a watch and having to pull my phone from my pocket to check the time has made me more relaxed about time in general, being early/late and being stressed out over other people being early/late.
How well they keep time should not necessarily be the only consideration, though. A couple of years ago, I went shopping for a cheap watch, because it's been years since I've used one and I wanted to feel one again. Most of the ones I saw on sale (all cheap ones) were incredibly bulky, so comfort is a consideration. Most couldn't be read in the dark, so that's another consideration. The one I ended up getting fell apart in a month, so construction is yet another consideration.
There's also the fun factor. Mechanical watches on the cheap end are usually not very good at keeping time compared to a quartz watch, and they stop if you don't wear them for a couple of days! Still, people buy mechanical watches and wear them diligently to keep the rotor moving.
It's a bit like driving manual. There's fun in taking care of a machine that responds promptly to your body movement and adapts to your lifestyle, even if there are plenty of alternatives that require no such care.
Casio alarm chrono cost me 10 bucks. Water resistant has a button to illuminate. Is not bulky. Stylish in a kind of classic retro way. Had one for 2 years until one of bands wore through, probably from fiddling with it too much. Got another for 15 last year and now it's got no signs of wear and just works.
Yeah, that sounds far better than what I saw. I swear, a toy watch from a cereal box should have been worth more money than the watches I saw. What a waste of metal.
Growing up in a working class family I never had access to luxury goods. In the last few years, thanks to a middle class job and a switch on my mindset, I had the privilege to be able to indulge in better quality goods than ever before.
After looking into high fashion brands and searching the internet I'm convinced of the following corollary: for almost any high street brand product, there is an equivalent or better quality one produced for a fraction of the price.
Absolutely. For instance kitchenware, you could go to the fancy high street shop and get the lifestyle brands.
Or you could go to a kitchen supply store and get the same quality items that the professionals use, which will be more expensive than the cheap department store items, but will last a lifetime or more in an ordinary person's kitchen.
Or whisky. I could spend big bucks on the big hyped brands, and get perfectly acceptable whisky, but probably sold at 40% ABV, chill filtered with caramel color added.
Or I could buy from independent bottlers and get cask strength, non-chill filtered whisky with no color added, usually at a lower price, for something so much more interesting.
No, I won't have fancy bottles of MacAllan or whatever sitting on my shelf for all to see, but I care a lot more about the whisky than the branded bottle it's in.
> As Will Wilkinson points out, the available data suggest that citizens of countries with liberal free-market economies are among the most satisfied, which explains why the United States, which exemplifies exactly the sort of amok consumerism that Layard and others worry about, is one of the happiest nations on Earth.
People like new stuff, old things bore them, a perfectly luxury 2 year old Benz car will Be replaced by a newer one. You know is a old model, so the newer model also works out for status. They need it to entertain themselves, directly and indirectly.
> [T]here is nothing wrong with this. “Decoration and adornment are neither higher nor lower than ‘real’ life,” she writes. “They are part of it.”
Couldn't you say this about anything? War is neither higher nor lower than 'real' life, it is a part of it. A true statement, but essentially nhilistic.
It's not nihilistic, it's relativistic. War is bad because I don't like it. Things I like aren't bad by some supposed objective standard. My aesthetic in jewelery isn't better or worse than your aesthetic in video games or books.
One issue is there's a kind of missing middle in many goods markets. There's cheap shit, and overpriced "luxury" signaling goods that may or may not be much better. Personally I often find sorting the actually-good from the faux-good on the (lower end of the) luxury side, then catching it used or on sale, easier than trying to find then assess the quality of mid-level products (if they exist at all—often they do not) or suss out unusually good cheap products.
So far as signaling goes, until people stop being biased in favor of folks who look well-off (or at least "proper" for whatever setting), even when they think they're not, that won't stop being a thing worth considering.
EDIT: nb. there's a lot more to this article, for those who haven't read it yet, and I'm in no way intending to dismiss it.