The Lure of Luxury
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/dq5d9c/i_...
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.
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.
I think wirecutter is pretty close.
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.
--------------
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.
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.
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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).
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.
But I've seen poor people believe in it.
Maybe this is useful in some cases.
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.
If someone's signalling doesn't make sense to you, then it wasn't intended for you.
There are groups and sub-groups in society and we tune our behaviors to fit into our desired groups. Partly consciously and partly not.
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.
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.”
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.
If you enjoyed Professor Bloom's writing, check out his research on babies' sense of morality: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html
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.
/s
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".
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.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/30/bill-gates-...
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] example of a watch a normal person probably finds showy: https://invictastores.com/men/invicta-pro-diver-mens-quartz-...
[1] $63k on a rubber strap https://forums.watchuseek.com/f29/fs-patek-philippe-aquanaut...
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.
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.
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.
Pseudoscience.
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.