Products where the premium model is worse

Recently I replaced my electric kettle. I had two basic choices: a moulded plastic kettle; around $25 for a brand-name. Or a stainless steel kettle; upwards of $60 for the same brands.

I use a kettle often, so I don’t mind paying for a premium product if it’s genuinely better. But in this case it isn’t in most respects. Stainless steel kettles are noisier. The plastic ones usually boil faster. And the stainless ones are prone to leaking, where they join steel to plastic for the fill gauge. They both have a similar life span.

Sure the steel ones usually look better. But they all start to look ratty after a while. Maybe a top-of-the-line kettle solves all of those problems, but I’m not inclined to pay five or six times the price for something that’s merely as good as the basic model.

What other products are there, where the more expensive premium models are arguably worse than the basic versions?

At the local swimming pool, there’s a choice between a single scoop or double scoop snowcone. The single scoop cone is placed in a paper wrapper and can easily be licked or ate without much mess. The double scoop cone is placed in a larger, deluxe plastic container and the scoops are so massive the ice cannot be readily ate. You have to lick flavorless ice while the majority of the flavoring drips down into the plastic cone, so you are left with messy liquid flavoring in the base with a massive block of ice on top.

The exterior styling of Acura, Honda’s premium brand, is pretty awful, whereas that of regular Hondas is pretty good. This opinion appears to be pretty widespread. People make fun of the “beak” on the front grille. I was talking to a salesperson in a Honda dealer one day, and they were making fun of Acura, and not just the styling. It just seems to be a pretty douchey brand overall.

When I was in high school and college, I had a couple of aunts, whose typical Christmas/birthday gift was a bottle of cologne. So I acquired a large collection of scents. I rarely wear the stuff, but when I do, I notice that I get far more compliments when I wear cheap supermarket after-shave, than when I wear expensive designer-label cologne.

A couple of restaurants in my town serve “aged steaks”, and their menus have half a page devoted to the wonderful aging process. Well, they are good, but not good enough to be worth an extra twenty bucks. There is a subtle difference in texture and flavor, and I am certain that the gourmands love it, but to my bourgeois taste, it says “freezer burn”. If I were visiting a friend’s house, and he served it for dinner, I would think that he was cleaning out the fridge, and trying to get rid of stuff before it spoiled.

In my town, the mid-price restaurants serve grilled salmon. The fancy restaurants serve champaigne-poached salmon. I prefer it grilled. I also prefer the bread in mid-range restaurants to the hard, dry, crumbly rolls you get in the expensive places.

I am ready to burn these pants.

I normally like to keep two pairs of dress slacks on hand for work. I lost one pair last winter, when the fly gave out. Back in February I was on a little mini vacation, and saw a store open a few hours before I had to return home. They had one style of slacks.

They were $165. I figured that for that much, they’d better make me look like Brad Pitt, at least from the waist down.

They were about 3 feet too long. That’s because they did in-store tayloring. Perfect! Expensive pants that are custom-taylored. I like to enjoy the finer things in life.

Goddam flood pants that wrinkle at a sideways glance and collect lint better than one of those rolling tape things and itch like hell. Burn them!