People pay a premium for goods that exhibit prized characteristics. I’m curious how a consensus is established about what these characteristics are. Like the explanation for so many things, it’s probably a combination of learned behavior and instinct, the exact proportions of these two ingredients depending on the person and the good in question.
I’m struck by how many dollars could be saved by someone whose ideas regarding prized characteristics of goods directly opposed common consensus. It would be effortlessly frugal living. Take these three food examples:
Day-old bagels are packaged together and sold at half price on the discount rack. Yogurt past the sell-by date is donated to the food bank.
Box wine…’nough said.
It’s one thing for some hag to enjoy these “lower-end” foodstuffs remorsefully, wishing they could afford fresh bagels, bottled wine, etc. It’s something quite different if there’s a person out there who genuinely prefers goods with unpopular characteristics (stale, approaching rancidity) to those goods with characteristics favored by the majority of people. Essentially, they would be paying less to buy things they enjoy more.
Look at wine closer. The only thing I know about wine is that its price range varies from being free to being so expensive that its purchase serves more the purpose of being a symbol of social status than a beverage to accompany a meal. I’m guessing that the more expensive a bottle, the closer a wine approaches the ideal qualities which wine drinkers have been conditioned to believe the perfect wine should possess. This means that an experienced drinker wouldn’t have much trouble lining up samples of wine in order of cheapest to most expensive. The ideas about what makes a good wine good have been so well established for so long that they’re unlikely to change anytime soon, but I’m entertained by the idea that a social outcast, who has no preconceptions about what a good wine should be like and doesn’t operate under the assumption that the more expensive the bottle the better the wine, could prefer box wine to a $500 glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Obviously, this idea applies to all goods, not just food. So, for example, someone who prefers acrylic to real cashmere wool and capitalizes on the lower cost also.