At the expense of the poorest and least educated, who will desperately but their luxury goods for their status symbol. So depending on their marketing Bang&Olufsen could become the next Luis Vuiton or Gucci in their market niche
For what it's worth I've got a bunch of late 90s/early 2000s B&O stuff and I've had exactly one person that recognized the speakers.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09111...
That article doesn't reference Veblen goods, which seems like a relevant Wikipedia link. A Veblen good is a product, the perceived value of which is related to its price rather than its utility, in defiance of all common sense.
A lot of households with bank accounts are considered 'underbanked', a euphemism meaning they've got enough money for a bank account, but also use services like payday loans, pawn shops, money orders, and so on. These are poor people, unless you arbitrarily choose the cutoff for poverty as "cannot get a credit card", which I don't think anybody does.
And the majority of these household have credit cards. This is from an FDIC survey summary:
> Underbanked households were less likely to have a credit card and were more likely to have both bank and nonbank personal loans than fully banked households in 2021. For example, 62.4 percent of underbanked households had a credit card, compared with 76.6 percent of fully banked households. (https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html)
And here's another source, from the Federal Reserve Bank of NY, saying:
> Credit card debt is the most commonly held debt across all income groups, yet only half of low-income households have access to a credit card. (https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/press/the-stat...)
It's more a problem of banks' policy or maybe mental health. Should B&O refuse to sell to poor people?
When I've seen B&O mentioned, it's usually people bashing them for being mediocre audio quality sold more based on form than substance. That seems to be their business model, maybe a problem for those that have a lot of money to burn. But for the poorest? It's like saying that the problem with Lamborghini is how they squeeze the working class with their prices.
There is people addicted to shopping that spends way too much in cheap stuff. Mountains of useless shiny things. This is not about price.