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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.

At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].

[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...

[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...

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Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.

The car analogy doesn’t land for me. I was trying to show an example where people paid to opt out of advertising. The car example, is the exact thing the person I was replying to was talking about… a brand sells the customer something expensive, then keeps advertising to them in hopes that they will keep buying more nonsense to go with it… selling to the captive audience. This is exactly what I don’t want.

Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?

Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?

¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…

The point was that the highest level of luxury does not advertise itself. If Apple wants to be seen as a luxury brand, which is something they spent decades building, they should not be pushing these ads so hard. Building that image took a long time, but it can all go away very quickly.

Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.

> Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt

Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.

Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?

If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?

It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.

Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.

I've never understood this.

You can get shirts tailored (bespoke, not MTM!) for well under $100 in Istanbul, around $150 in Hongkong, and about $200 in Mexico City.

So why pay to be a walking advertisement for some European brand conglomerate?

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