Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Take a luxury and make it a commodity.

It works the other way, too. Water is a commodity -- a commodity which is, essentially, free at the margin -- that is also a multi-billion dollar business in the US. Much the same could be said about food.

(I am about to step on some toes. Turn away if you're easily offended.) There are entire industries which are designed around the proposition "You are too good to consume X. Poor people consume X. You should instead be consuming X Prime. You can tell it is better than X, because it costs five times as much."

A separate but related issue: consumption of status goods among poor people.

In terms of selling B2B services, I am often amused by re-luxurization of commoditized services: taking something which was once customized and extraordinarily expensive but then made into cheap-and-infinite-scale and then competing with the cheap-and-infinite with something that is a cut above but which still scales.

Data centers circa 1996: luxury service. Web hosting: commodity service. Slicehost: not a commodity service, but the marginal cost to the firm is still close to zero.

Personalized financial advice: luxury service. Your bank's website and free checking: commodity service. Mint: personalized financial advice, but at scale.

Graphic design: luxury service. Stock icons: commodity service. 99designs: commodity-priced luxury service that scales.

People often come up with water as an example, but it fails on many levels:

In many cities the "native" water is full of chlorine If you travel to a foreign country, you may not be able to drink the native water at all If you are not at home, getting water may not be possible unless you by it in bottles. Bottles enable you to carry around water, which is useful for car trips, etc.

For home use, one would use a filter can, at a fraction of the price of bottled water.

On the contrary, if smart people can be convinced to ignore the practically inexhaustible and freely available supply of water in every building in most first world countries, then I think the de-commoditization of water was an astounding success.

(I mention this because it is intellectually interesting to me, not because I hold contempt in my heart for people who buy bottled water, by the way.)

Incidentally: HN doesn't support unordered lists very well, particularly if you like starting them with asterixes. The best alternative I have for you is starting them with + signs and putting two linebreaks between points.

I think this falls flat as well. Many people have tap water at home that is a) hard and/or b) doesn't taste very good. You can tell the difference.

Yes - and I think that the number of people who buy bottled water exclusively for home drinking are vastly outnumbered by all of us who buy it when we're out because it's convenient and not full of HFCS/sugar/evil.

You can also buy a water filter, and get better tasting water extremely cheaply when compared to bottles.

One of the key things about good marketing is that when it works, you'll have people reiterating your talking points for you without even realizing it.

Case in point the above comment. Those of us in our thirties remember the world without bottled water, and life went on.

Excellent example is the "Mexican Cola" story: coke with real sugar that costs way more than coke with corn syrup.

Or iPods, really.

I don't see why this is a good example.

Coke with corn syrup is far cheaper to produce, but tastes really bad.

Coke with real sugar costs more to produce, and tastes better.

Care to enlighten?

The article I read about it gave me the impression that the difference in taste was very minor. I rarely drink Coke and I've never tasted both in comparison, so I could very well be wrong. Forgive me my ignorance.

You're forgiven! (Plus... a packaged food product from Mexico being super-premium? Interesting idea.)

For reference, here is the deliciousness Coke spectrum, from best to worst:

YUMMY...

Coke with real sugar in a glass bottle

Coke with real sugar in a can

Coke with real sugar in a plastic bottle

Coke with HFCS (yum!) in a can or glass bottle (makes no diff)

Coke with HFCS in plastic

...GROSS

For the record, Dr Pepper with real sugar is even more amazing than Coke with real sugar. And you can't apparently make Mtn Dew with real sugar because it'd be so saturated it wouldn't stay in a solution. Rock on!

Yet another reason to move to Canada and/or Europe.

Of course All Pepsi beat Coke in taste tests ;) It's far sweeter.

FYI, you can just go to the grocery store around passover and stock up on "Coke with real sugar" (find the ones with yellow lids) for the exact same price as "Coke with corn syrup". I don't find it tastes any different, but I prefer it because real sugar is better for you. Well, more like "mildly less bad for you", but still.

If you want to know how to get food without garbage in it, go find some non-rich people who have moral or religious restrictions against the garbage, and then do what they do. It actually works.

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