When quality is hard to judge, price becomes a shortcut.
More quotesA pineapple worth roughly £5,000 in today’s terms was sometimes displayed until it collapsed. This was a dreadful use of fruit and an excellent use of scarcity.
Eating it ended the signal. Letting it sit allowed visitors to see the owner’s access, connections and capacity for glorious waste. The rotten object was still performing its expensive job.
That should make anyone cautious about asking whether luxury products are “worth it”. Worth what? A watch may tell time no better than a cheap one while doing far more work as recognition, ritual and membership. Functional comparison misses the reason some customers arrived.
Equally, price can perform quality when quality is absent. Staged scarcity, waiting lists and ornate language encourage the buyer to treat difficulty as proof. Sometimes the difficulty comes from skilled labour or rare material. Sometimes it comes from a marketing department rationing stock with a straight face.
The honest commercial choice is to decide which value is being sold. If it is durability, show wear after years of use. If it is craft, reveal the decisions and labour. If it is status, spare us the medical claims about superior wellbeing and admit that other people noticing is part of the fun.
Blind tests remain useful because they remove the social signal and expose what the product contributes by itself. They do not reveal the entire purchase.
The pineapple browns. Nobody eats it. Guests still remember who had one.