Individually packaged strawberries… Some people just want to get fucked by the environment, don’t they?
The flying fuck is a erewhan?? Who is this for??
Think Whole Foods but even more expensive.
Well, originally it was a novel, which is what I know the word for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
…but apparently it’s also a luxury California grocery store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon_Market
Erewhon Market (/ˈɛrɛhwɒn/ ERR-eh-hwon) is a California-based upscale grocery chain with ten locations, all in Los Angeles County, California, United States.[4][5][6]
In June 2021, Erewhon became a Certified B Corporation, recognizing its commitment to social and environmental responsibility.
Japan has strawberries that can be $500+ each.
I saw a cooking or travel show that featured the guy who grows those a while back. Apparently they taste absolutely amazing, but I can’t imagine justifying spending that much money on a strawberry.
Yeah I remember that.
For the amount of work the grower does you’re getting a steal but for what you’re getting … it’s a tall order.
I grow strawberries and have a container I try to baby and ill be honest you’d have to pay me more than 500 bucks to care for them that much 😂
We have reached peak Marie Antoinette stages of US opulence.
In most respects, most of us probably have a considerably higher standard of living than Marie Antoniette, simply because of what technological advancement has provided us with.
e.g.
https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-timaru-herald/20160530/281784218342032
Versailles stank. Not just the bodily tang one might expect 200 years before the invention of deodorant (that was 1888: a paste applied to the underarms), but a rank stench that permeated every room, every corridor, and wafted over the gardens.
‘‘I shall never get over the dirt of this country,’’ sniffed Horace Walpole on a visit to France.
Versailles, the centre of French political power from 1682, had more than 700 rooms but no functioning loos until 1768. By the time of the revolution, there were still only nine bathrooms, all in the private royal apartments. The contents of chamber pots were often simply flung out of the windows.
The royal dogs were not housetrained but nor were the courtiers and their servants who crammed into the building. The result was a lavatorial free-for-all, from which no corner of the palace was spared.
‘‘Versailles was a vast cesspool,’’ wrote one historian. ‘‘The odour clung to clothes, wigs, even undergarments. Beggars, servants, and aristocratic visitors alike used the stairs, the corridors, any out-of-the-way place, to relieve themselves.’’
For Louis XIV and his later imitators, architecture was politics, a way to overawe rivals for power - nobility, princes and lawyers - and focus attention exclusively on the ruler. But while Versailles looked magnificent from the outside, on the inside it was overcrowded, smelly and infested with vermin.
Most of us probably wouldn’t readily tolerate living like that.
French royalty could, no doubt, have live musicians or actors performing works that they want. But on the other hand, we have a vast digital library of video and audio of such scope and content…they could only comprehend them as dreams brought to life, created with resources well beyond what they could afford, because we have spread the costs over many and provided the output to many.
We can eat food from around the world in any season.
If I want the air in my living space to be chilly in summer, I can do so.
There are definitely some services that I’m sure that French royalty could avail themselves of that we cannot. But I think that it’s easy to lose perspective of how staggering the increases of standard-of-living have been over a couple of centuries.
It’s a metaphor, my dude, as in, “Let them eat cake.” Thanks for the “akshually,” though.
Gross. But thanks, I appreciate knowing this.
Anyone wanna start a business with me? Luxury organic prime $18 strawberries picked fresh from my local supermarket daily. All I need is some swank packaging and a storefront.
$19
$18
Normally, in markets, you can sell below someone else’s price and customers will indeed come to you. Lower price means more demand. That is, this is a traditional demand curve.
However, there are some goods for which this does not hold. For such goods, increasing the price actually means that there is more demand. The thing becomes more-desirable the more expensive it is.
That’s frequently associated with luxury goods. There, the price itself can make something a status symbol, or perhaps people use price information to try to judge how desirable the thing is.
The economic term for such a thing is a Veblen good.
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve.
The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
My guess is that this strawberry isn’t actually all that amazing. What makes it notable is that it, well, costs $19. It may be a Veblen good, in which case you may have a hard time trying to sell similar strawberries while focusing on the value proposition.
What I’m getting is we need to sell the strawberries for $20 then?
You can try it. My $30 strawberry is more desirable due to its luxury properties.
Maybe also some prominent branding, so that it’s very clear that the strawberry isn’t coming from somewhere like, you know, Erewhon.
I saw that Zuckerberg had a $900,000 watch. I cannot figure out what would cause a watch the cost that much so I figured someone is just selling an expensive watch and a billionaire will buy it because it’s expensive.
So do you want to get in on expensive sticks we found in the woods? Starting price 200 grand
I mean, there’s a lot of very impressive manual labour in that watch. Not 900k of it, but still, if you wanna charge prices like that, you probably need some kinda storied history, or innovation, or whatever else you can gesture at justifying your outrageous pricing.
Also needs some stir, maybe find someone more or less famous willing to wear your product, would be best if they also made a scene while wearing it.
Status symbol, aka “I need to differentiate myself from those lowly serfs, lest they think themselves as equal to me!”
Can’t fix stupid
It’s not stupidity, it’s wealth.
When you have so much that you don’t know what to do with anymore, you start looking for more exotic ways to spend it and you settle on things like overprice produce and single use clothing items.
All of it in an attempt to feel some excitement from the boredom of being able to do whatever you want but being still constrained by your day to day life.
It sure looks stupid though when you could just buy a good strawberry and enjoy it.
