Open Thread

THERE YOU ARE BHO!!!!!

When I heard that, I thought first of YOU!!!

Oh well, you weren’t right on the brownstones, (or Lebron) but you were right on that!

hahaha….

Donatella!!! ‘mello baby!!! Told ya’ll.

***Bid half off peak comps***

There are other aspects too, though that affect the prices of products and that has to do with branding. Two amazing examples are water and coffee. Once upon a time, you turned on your tap and filled up a glass of water and drank it. Then, when was it?, people actually started to pay for water in bottles. Oil wasn’t always at these levels. I remember one guy complaining to me that gasoline was cheaper than bottled water (another era obviously). But the marketing of water itself was some kind of “idea” thing. Once you were drinking H20 from somebodys faucet and then you were paying for a bottle basically. Of course, I am not talking about water as a scare resource globally, I am talking about pure taste making, a branding and marketing campaign which was HUGE and which was successful. Once upon a time, most of us thought that was NUTS to buy water. Now…no.

The other thing is coffee. Used to be you met somebody for a beer, or a cocktail if you were upscale, a glass of
wine. Coffee came in two flavors regular and black…or if you were old decaf (Sanka). You paid some ridiculously low price and it was a generic thing. A commodity thing. Then came Starbucks and coffee shops. They used to have those places in Japan — kissaten — but there were NO SUCH THINGS as coffee shops, other than the Greek diners. “Whaddya want – regular? sugar? no sweet and low.

Contrast that to now. There was a marketing revolution. The marketing of coffee as an “experience”. I used to hear the Starbucks guys (I am a commodity person) TALK about this. So you may be a broke schmuck but you can buy your latte and hang out in the coffee shop and sip it luxuriously. I still cannot say tall. I say “I’ll have a small otherwise known as tall”, if I go to Starbucks. But that is a marketing/branding revolution. This whole coffee thing.

Now the coffee people are moving away from the high quality coffee thing that you pay 2 bucks for to something entirely different. They are selling “plantations”, i.e. you don’t buy Brazilian coffee, you but this one family’s plantation coffee. Oh yum yum. Just like selling wine, a particular wine from a particular vineyard (this elevation, stress from cold etc).

It a long way from a glass of water from the tap and just telling the guy “regular with milk and sweet and low”.

…speaking of high end luxury hand bags and shoes,
Whatever happened to leather?
I mean GENUINE leather that you could smell like a baseball glove.
These days, they tell you it’s genuine leather but either it’s an outright lie with some crappy substitute that has the look and feel of it with a half-life of 2.3 million years
or
it’s the thinest layer of leather and should be called
electroplated leather since it’s only microns thick.