3/17/10
This morning’s (i.e., 3/17/10’s) Wall Street Journal informs us that Chinese provincial officials are attacking foreign luxury brands for poor quality. According to officials in the province of Zhejiang, 48 of 85 samples of imported clothing from 30 international “luxury” brands failed to meet Chinese product quality standards.
Apparently, this is yet another thing the Chinese know that we don’t. Luxury brands, in many, if not most cases, are no better, and often are worse, than “non-luxury” brands. This holds for cars, clothes, shoes, electronics, you name it. The Chinese have discovered, as most of us have not, that buying a “luxury” brand involved paying scads of spondulicks for a name. Luxury brands are purchased, for the most part, by people with very fragile egos in an attempt to oh so temporarily fortify their teetering self-esteem by sporting a “designer” label.
In this country, sporting a designer label is supposed to mean “I’m an upscale, successful person.” What it really means is “I’m a financial moron, willing to spend money I don’t have on inferior merchandise because I am desperate to convince other people, and myself, that I’m some sort of big shooter. I define myself by the labels I wear, drive, eat, watch, etc. Come to think of it, we can drop the adjective ‘financial’ from the first sentence of this self-description.” The Chinese are apparently discovering this after a very short experience with “luxury” labels. We still haven’t figured it out after several generations of throwing our money away on worthless gimcracks that serve only to make us even thirstier for the ever illusory peace of mind and self-fulfillment.
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1 comment:
I read your post, and I was so upset I nearly spilled my Starbuck's Mocha on my I-phone.
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