I’m not looking at business machines - they do have decent mass market business machines - but their home PCs that they market so aggressively annoy the piss out of me. They are underpowered, oftehn unupgradable, and rather cheap in general. A decent home PC needs to be upgradable and have options. I know a lot of people who need a cheap PC, bought a Dell, and were upset that they couldn’t slap on a better video card or whatever later. I and most local non-brand name computer stores can produce better systems and provide better service than Dell can for not much more.
If I needed to equip an office real quick and real cheap, then yea, I’d go with Dell and just Ghost the systems and have them be idiot boxes. If I was recommending a home PC…no way in hell.
I contracted for Bose about 14 years ago, and I agree with some of this. The man who mixed their inside-sales demo recordings then didn’t even like the sound of the speakers. A lot of people feel they lack “warmth”, whatever you want to make of that.
Part of the problem with Bose is there is a disconnect between the engineers and the marketers.
Their current consumer product, the Acoustic Wave Radio, was being introduced around this time. It is designed to project sound from what is essentially a single point in a way that gives you a sense of stereo almost anywhere in a small, more or less reflective room. In the right environment, it was truly amazing when you thought about getting real stereo out of a single location, compact unit.
However, the marketing pushed it as an upscale, take-anywhere boombox, complete with pictures of the unit at the beach, etc. Anyone who tried this would be sorely disappointed in the sound.
The flagship Bose 901 speakers, similarly, work great in the right kind of room, but terribly in any other environment. They do stand up to a lot of abuse, however.
The first version of the Acoustimass system (the first of the “tiny stereo satellites with hidden bass box” setups) were great in terms of convenient use of small space, but had no midrange. All the sales demos had to compensate for this.
They were selling the noise-cancelling headphones to the Air Force and Navy around this time, though, and those were truly innovative.
However, even Dr. Bose himself was of the opinion that the company now run day-to-day by his former engineering students was badly managed, and if it were not for their carefully cultivated cachet that gets people to spend the big bucks, they would have gone under years ago.
Perfumes excell at that, one of my jobs is graphic designer for a digital printing shop, for what I can see there and the relationship with the costumers, I WAG that 90% of the end price of perfumes (the fancy, celebrity kind stuff, J-Lo, Katerine Z. Jones et al) covers the cost of marketing.
The same for other cosmetic products, it´s mind bogling to see the cash they shove into marketing the most laughable products (Shampoo with vegetal DNA, yeah, sure, whatever… :rolleyes: ) I get to see it first hand and I can´t wrap my mind how could all this be profitable, at least here.
Those are good examples. I just saw a show the other night showing that high-end cosmetics like Estee Lauder were chemically identical to many cheaper cosmetics, and the super high priced stuff that can sell for $500 for a tiny jar were also identical. It’s all marketing.
Blasphemy! :mad: Krispy Kreme donuts are the sweet food of the Gods; they are the single best foodstuff I have EVER eaten. Other donuts don’t taste anywhere near as good.
I went to a “high end” home theater store one time and saw a Krell stereo that was $60,000! Just a preamp and 2 channel amp!
Sure, it was nice, but $60k for a stereo? :rolleyes:
Am I possibly the first person in this thread to nominate Starbucks?
Lots of really sub-mediocre coffee in those places. Nothing you can’t beat solidly with a can of Yuban, can of Medaglia D’Oro, a Mr. Coffee, and an espresso pot. Most of it would come in second in a cup-to-cup showdown with the traditional $1 tall cup from a randomly chosen deli doing breakfast specials.
I used to work for a rental car company, and had to deal with a large number of car dealerships, including repair shops and body shops. This is anecdotal but they all consistently seemed to feel that Cadillacs were overpriced pieces of shit. I noticed a fair number of people renting cars while their Cadillacs were in for repairs (of course, that was true of most American cars).
Designer clothes is one area that gets me mad. I find that generally, you get what you pay for, and better quality clothing generally costs more and has a better name on it, but when I see some brands selling their stuff for exhorbitant 3 or 4 digit prices I get pissed off because I may see that exact same shirt, made with the exact same materials, and probably at the exact same sweatshop, but without the brand name selling for $20. But that’s not very often.
People say this, and I don’t understand! Maybe the other doughnut shops around here are mediocre, but they are so light and flaky. Mmm . . . I do love doughnuts. looks at his stomach Yeah, maybe too much.
But that’s the thing - products might not be able to be ranked objectively. A particular product may not be any better than the competition, but if it has some unique quality that a particular group of people desires, it’s worth more to them.
Perfumes, though, theoretically all smell different. (Short of designer-imposter types.) And they’re made with expensive, hard-to-find ingredients, which means the knock-offs may well not have the same smell.
Sure, the $80 bottle of perfume you buy may not be worth a tenth of that when you actually examine the cost of the product, but if you particularly like that one scent, you can’t get it elsewhere. And people like their perfumes to be “unique” - you don’t want to wear the same scent everyone else does. So the public has an interest in having a great variety of unique products, rather than interchangeable ones (which would lead to lower prices.)
Incidentally, I’ve read that perfumes are the real moneymakers behind all the haute-couture fashion companies; the cost and low sales of the ultra-high-end clothes simply don’t turn into profit; it’s the association with elegance that lets them sell perfumes to the middle class that makes them rich. The economy is crazy.
I can’t wrap my head arond the consumers who buy these things. Most high-end cosmetics are made by the same companies as the drugstore brands - Estee Lauder and L’Oreal make products that are basically identical. They might use different fragrances to distinguish them, and the Estee Lauder ones no doubt have fancy packaging, but anyone who spends a hundred bucks on a face cream has serious problems.
And none of the bizarre, rare ingredients these products are marketed with have any impact on your body. Why the hell would the Tierra del Fuego Spiny Fire Orange extract or Sri Lanka Honey Orchid oil or whatever exotically-named crap they put in impact your skin in the first place? Of course, that’s assuming they’re there in some quantity. Aveda makes an eye cream with ground up tourmaline. Of course, it’s less than a tenth of a percent of the product. But people believe the claims.
The craziest part is that the drugstore brands (owned by the same companies as the high-end rip-offs) often are the first to market a new innovation, since it’s a larger market. The $500 eye cream market is an afterthought to the companies.
The differences between the products are due to the choices of chemicals they put in. The chemicals all come from the same chemical manufacturers. Paying fifty times as much for the same sodium laureth sulfate and propylene glycol in a different jar is the definition of gullibility to me. But I’ve lost count of how many friends claim that salon brands of shampoo “really are different” and that “you use less” and the other ones are “just like dish soap.”
There’s only one company from which I’ll buy expensive (ish -we’re not talking those $200 seaweed face creams or anything) skin care products, as opposed to generic sorbolene skin cream, and that’s because in spite of my skepticism, they’ve provided a different result for me. It’s also because their perfumes are genuinely hypoallergenic so I can use their products without discomfort and not just get non-perfumed everything. But I’m aware that the amount of demonstrable difference in outcome is probably minute from the generics. I see a difference, I make the choice to use their stuff, but I’m still relatively dubious. Each one of their products has to impress me individually for me to buy it again, I’m not going to get sucked in just for the brand-name. I do pay more than I’d like for salon-brand hair product but then I’d perform voodoo rituals if they made my hair easier to manage, so as long as I see a benefit I’ll tuck my skepticism into my backpocket and keep shelling out.
The price of almost anything is what a willing seller and a willing buyer agree upon.
Having said that Brand Names are heavily invested in because buyers have the mistaken idea that there is something special in a particular brand name, and there is the expensive advertising that brain washers followers into a mind set that they must have that particular brand to be with the “In” crowd.
If you will take the time to look carefully you can find identical, unbranded items in another part of the same store or one nearby at a signifigantlys lower prices.
You know, the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the OP was “Audio cables.” Get out of my head, you Albertan bastard!!
SEriously… my best friend Scott is a nice guy and I love him, but he’s a walking example of what Veblen was trying to explain. He buys hundreds-of-bux audio cables despite me telling him he’s a fool to do so. I also suspect many “high end” receivers, amps, players, etc. are simply medium-level boxes with fancier faceplates and maybe $50 worth of additional features sold for a thousand dollars more. Oh, yeah, Scott buys a new, ultra-expensive reciever every year. I have never noticed an improvement in sound.
His biggest purchase, though, was a brand I’m surprised hasn’t come up yet: a BMW automobile. Yes, he bought a BMW, a car notorious for having frequent and expensive mechanical difficulties and which on the inside doesn’t appear any more luxurious to me than a Subaru Forester. It also doesn’t drive much better than any one of a dozen midside cars I’ve driven (since I travel on business I get to drive a lot of different cars.) BMWs are pure class symbols and nothing else. I’d rather buy a Hyundai and save the money seven days a week. I’ve heard the Lexus is the same thing.
To an extent. But Lexus doesn’t have the reputation for unreliability that BMW has. A Lexus is a Toyota with a fancy trim package and more options in the base package. So in the case of Lexus, you are getting a very good automobile. But really, you could buy the loaded Camry instead. It’s the same deal with Acura (Honda) and Infinity (Nissan).
This is a slight hijack, but I’ve found that price/performance follows an exponential curve. The trick to getting value is to stay in the ‘flat’ section of the curve, where increased value goes up fairly linearly with price. A $5 hand cream is much better than a $1 hand cream. A $20 handcream may be somewhat better, but probably not much. A $200 hand cream contains almost no added value.
In cars, I’ve found that the point at which the slope of the curve starts ramping up quickly is around $25,000 US. Or up to $35,000 if you’re looking for added performance, or AWD, or added luxury. After that, the slope gets pretty steep, and buying a $85,000 BMW won’t gain you much over a $35,000 Lexus. But a $35,000 Lexus is significantly better than a $20,000 Ford. But there is a HUGE difference between a $25,000 car or small SUV, and an entry-level $12,000 car.
In stereo gear, it seems to me that the slope is pretty flat until you get to a system cost of maybe $5,000 for a home theater setup. After that, the improvement in real performance is small, or even nonexistent. A $20,000 stereo will not sound 5X better. It won’t even sound twice as good. There may be a very slight difference to a highly critical listener, and that’s about it.
Here’s another high-end product that is actually of middling sound quality. B&O has nice-lloking stuff, with all kinds of modern touches…I like their CD players (the glas doors open with a wave of your hand). The problem with Bang and Oloffson is that they use the same amplifiers inside…their $4000 stero receiver uses a pretty low-end audio amplifier…and the stuff is fantastically expensive to fix when it breaks. B&O focusses on the appearence of their products, and negelects the insides, I think. But the real imposter is the high-end Italian men’s clothes (like Brioni…a favorite of the late mob boss John Gotti). Their $5000.00 men’s suits are no better than a $500.00 department store brand…you are paying for the name.
I don’t understand this at all, but you’re proving the point that people just don’t judge subtleties well. The person shelling out hundreds of dollars for a particular brand of audio cable is quite sure he hears a difference as well - because he’s influenced by factors other than the sound.
The product may be good, but none of the good-but-expensive products are any better than much cheaper ones. And “hypoallergenic” is a label claim - there’s no definition for it, so any product can claim it, legally-speaking. You may have found a product line with scents that don’t inflame your allergies, but that’s strict luck-of-the-draw. Unfragranced skin care products are always better.
Unfortunately, you’re illustrating the point of this thread quite well. The guy who buys mediocre but expensive champagne is quite sure it tastes better, just as the guy who pays ridiculous amounts of money for speaker cables thinks they sound better. Being impressed by a hair product is especially easy, because while there are some very bad products out there, none of them are ever exceptional. There’s a very small number of chemicals used to make shampoos and conditioners (fewer yet for styling products.) There just isn’t any difference between salon brands and store brands. Especially since, again, most expensive cosmetics are made by the same companies, out of the same chemicals, as cheaper ones.
Couldn’t agree more; you could make a Ph.D. thesis on explaining why, though. Is it economy of scale, elasticity of demand, or both? I suspect it’s a bit of both.
The one area where the theory doesn’t explain things, though, is in items of a purely fashionable value. Many things like handbags, high heel shoes, and other items of fashion don’t have a practical purpose beyond being expensive and so can’t be placed along the same scale. Manolo Blahnik shoes are cheap crap that cannot be easily distinguished from any number of $15 bargain bin specials are the nearest Shoe Factory, but they’re still about twenty standard deviations above the mean price of a decent women’s shoe. In that case you aren’t even getting any added value at all. I have a coworker who regularly pays $200 for expensive ties that don’t look any better than a $25 tie off the rack at Moore’s. While I was browsing the Net looking or examples I found that Kate Spade sells 52-page notepads for $18 a pair. NINE DOLLARS for a pad of paper with a little dragonfly on it; a pad of paper of equal quality can be had in any Office Depot for $1 a pop.
That’s not true of all clothing, of course. Clothing with a practical purpose does fit your model. If I pay $500 for a new suit I will get a better-fitting and more comfortable suit than if I pay $300, which will get me a much better suit than if I pay $100. I can spend $1200 on a really nice suit, but it’s not THAT much better than the $500 suit. If I wanna go nuts I can spend $2500 on an Aflred Sung fashion, but it’s not really going to be noticeably better.
The question, though, is why? This isn’t a cut-and-dried supply and demand issue. We have a thread about why diamonds are expensive every other month, but that’s really easy to explain; people reeeeeally like diamonds, so the demand is high. The demand for high end stereos or BMWs seems to suggest a lack of information on one side of the transaction.
Another overpriced items: Fashionable restaurant fare. We’ve had discussions about Ruthschris steakhouse steaks costing $50 when a $20 Canyon Creek steak tastes every bit as good, but it applies to any one of a hundred restaurants in any metropolitan area that sell $48 entrees that don’t taste much better than a Whopper.
I thought he was kookoo.