Expensive = Better

Posted on Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 06:31 pm

We hear it all the time and probably also practice it to a certain extent ourselves… like when shopping for a product we’re not familiar with, comparing the various brands, looking at the price differences and wondering why one particular brand is more expensive than the others, and inevitably, something like this would come up:

Maybe you should get this one. It’s more expensive, but it’s probably better that’s why.

Well, is it really? Does more expensive automatically mean it’s ultimately superior? It goes without saying that in general, stuff that lacks quality would cost less to make/do and hence be less expensive by the time it reaches the retail level. And I really do understand and respect that. But of course the trick these days is that it’s often the brand itself that’s costing more and not so much what goes into the actual product.

People spout so much of that my services and products are better because of so and so reasons… and you take pride in quality don’t you? spiel that in the end, I sometimes think this “expensive is better” mentality is just another way for more fakes to take advantage of yet more suckers.

Recently, there’s been some discussions in various threads at the two cartomancy forums I frequent, talking about famous so-called psychics or Tarot readers out there - AKA the ones who get a lot of public coverage and charge outrageous fees for their “seeing sessions”. Sylvia Browne in particular, among a couple others, caught my eye. According to her site, a psychic reading with Sylvia is:

...very much like meeting a long lost friend whom you loved deeply… She reaches into your soul, washes out the pain, repairs the damage, then gives you the courage and direction to continue your journey through life.

This friend who can apparently wash out your pain will then turn around and suck out your blood by charging you $850 for a freakin’ 20-30 minute reading. Nice friend. No love from me there for damn sure. Yet she’s supposedly insanely popular. And don’t even get me started on Miss Cleo.

Fennario from one of the forums said something about how all big money psychics are fakes, and I’m inclined to believe the same. This “expensive is better” thing is really especially bad in this field. I have yet to see one who doesn’t scream FAKE, especially those spewing crap about their gift of helping people (to do what, make them broke?). Yet the sad part is people really buy into their bullshit. It’s like, “Wow, she must be good if so much people are willing to pay this much to get a reading from her!”

That is, until millions of dollars have been wasted on these fakes and it finally becomes known that it was all a fraud, which just makes the whole metaphysical field go down in flames yet again. It especially pisses me off in these cases, because it really gives legitimate readers and “real” psychics a bad name. But hey, if a popular reader who charges 50 bucks a minute turns out to be fake, why believe in the generally unknown one who charges $30 for a comprehensive hour long reading?

There’s a whole long string of stuff I can rant about for that, but I digress. Besides, the metaphysical field is probably not a good general example being that most people think it’s all fake anyway, even if it was what prompted this post to begin with. But regardless of what industry, product, or services, we all seem to fall into this trap at one point or another.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve chosen certain brands simply because I didn’t know better and hoped that the more expensive one meant it’s better. Just the other day, I was holding 3 boxes of roach motels in my hands (it’s Taiwan, summer is arriving, there are more roaches in this country than there are people, and we all know I’m terrified of them)... so what did I choose? The most expensive one, in hopes that it would mean roaches DIE DIE DIE… but was it really the best and most effective one? Who knows.

Perhaps, in the end, it’s all just for the peace of mind.

Sorted under: Just Thinking
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Welcome. Graychalk.com is a personal blog of Téa and mainly an attempt to gather all the misplaced pieces in her life.

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