Alyssa Antoci, the niece of the owners of the luxury grocery store, went viral on TikTok after sharing her review of the berry from the Japanese vendor Elly Amai.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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