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You Are a Snob
No one likes a snob. He lowers his salmon-colored Financial Times to register disgust with your every-colored USA Today. Picking up his detailed Maserati Quattroporte GTS (with sport package), he sighs as you bounce into the car wash with your 2008 Honda CR-V. He lives in a better neighborhood, his kids go to a better school, and his dog is a pure-bred shipped in from an artisanal kennel in Hungary.
Being called a snob is one of the worst insults you can offer to a class-denying American. That’s why CEOs brag to their employees about flying coach, celebs hang out with sick commoners at the local children’s hospital, and multimillionaire politicians suck down corn dogs like carny folk. (Note: None of these rules apply to The Donald, for he laughs at the iron laws of political physics.)
But the dirty little secret is that everyone is a snob. Hopefully not about many things, but always about something. Wherever you fall on the income scale, there is at least one area in which you will not skimp. The F-150 driver in rural Michigan who scoffs at the fools driving Chevy pickup trucks. A self-described redneck in Kentucky who only drinks Basil Hayden’s bourbon. The stoned surfer who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Quiksilver tee.
As for me, I’m a snob about a couple of things, but especially coffee. I might not live in a mansion or commute to Ricochet HQ on my Gulfstream, but I will delay paying my water bill in order to get beans shipped from Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago. And I wouldn’t think twice.
A book titled Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods — and How Companies Create Them discusses how the vast majority of Americans of all income levels will treat themselves to something special:
America’s middle-market consumers are trading up.
They are willing, even eager, to pay a premium price for remarkable kinds of goods that we call New Luxury — products and services that possess higher levels of quality, taste, and aspiration than other goods in the category but are not so expensive as to be out of reach.
Consider Jake, a 34-year-old construction worker earning about $50,000 a year, whose passion is golf. It took Jake a year to save enough money to buy a complete set of Callaway golf clubs — $3,000 worth of premium titanium-faced drivers, putters, and wedges — although he could have bought a decent set from a conventional producer for under $1,000.
As I said, my snobby vice is coffee. Even if I was living in a box under a freeway bridge, if a businessman walked by with a tankard full of 7-11 Hazelnut Blend, I would shake my head and think, “what a loser.”
How about you: what are the one or two areas in which you’re a complete snob?
Published in General
Hay, LaRoche,
We’re in Good Company:
By the way, welcome, Jan.
The King Prawn
Why hasn’t the word pretentiousness entered the discussion yet?
Priustentious appletentiousness! (App-lee-ten-shus-ness)
N-Scale…N-scale! If it won’t hurt my toddler by falling on him, doesn’t require an adult to wind it up, isn’t made out of cast iron, steel, and tin and likely to explode or electrocute you, and isn’t covered in nickle, brass, lithography, or lead paint; it isn’t a real toy. It might be a model, but it isn’t a toy any self-respecting boy should play with, at least not for more than the 3 seconds before it breaks without also injuring the child! Look after years of warming up to your Ricochet persona, you are now dead to me…dead….
Pilsner Urquell tops the list, my friend. “Grolsch!” is an involuntary spasmodic esophageal response to a too-hasty imbibement of any beer or malt liquor (and sometimes Pepsi). Fun to say, yes, but too easy.
Darnit VC, I saw you several times at the Nashville Meetup and never got close enough to smell you. Now I’ll never know what I missed out on. Hey Anna, do have any interest in going to a Ricochet Meetup in Chicago or Kansas City next year?
Like the enhanced joy of sitting in stop-and-go traffic for a couple of hours.
CA v. MN.
Heh. Looks like the “Okie from Muskogee” still has some fire in his belly!
No disrespect to Merle Haggard, because I’ve bought some of his albums and like a lot of his songs. My wife read that article and told me about it. It doesn’t matter what the profession is, old-timers and retirees usually think that young people are lousy it. I’m sure the men 40 years older than Beethoven groused about those dang kids and their new-fangled symphonies. And I suspect when Merle Haggard first started making a name for himself there were old men who complained then that country music isn’t what it used to be.
:D Yes. In this one, narrow sense am I a Europhile. I guess. But, still not a Pinko.
Oh. I just realized I’m also a wings snob.
No. Not the band.
Skin, bone and rubbery-blubbery (H/T Shel Silverstein) connective tissue. That’s it.
What the heck is that about?
I’ll tell you what it’s about. It’s a medium for delivering the tasty sauce to your pie-hole.
You could just as well paint your finger with it.
I rest my case.
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
– Socrates
How very sad.
Only the finest wines (still or sparkling) from Amista Vineyards in Dry Creek Valley
Home roasted Costa Rico coffee beans from Sweet Maria’s
Damn kids and Their new fangled comments. No respect for Their elders. Comments ain’t nothing like They used to be in My time way back on Page 8.
If I’m not sure how to pronounce it (Urquell, not Pilsner) then it goes farther down on the list. Additionally, it has to be something I can continue to say the more of them I drink.
For some reason, my fave brew is the Austrian Gösser….
Just bought some Spaten Oktoberfest. Still great despite drinking after going to the Chinese buffet. I had some on tap once, probably the best beer I’ve ever had.
No doubt. The new Jeep designs must be the worst interpretation of a classic design in the history of mass production. Those grills look like nothing Jeep ever has been or should be. But how about Kia and Hyundai? There current styling is impressive – fully expect to see a luxury hood ornament on those cars.
I like Junior Brown:
More here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Junior+Brown
If you want a real Jeep you can try importing one from India:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahindra_Thar
Isn’t Black Label a Canuckistani brand? Carling’s a Montreal brewery (or was), no?
I thought the whole point of KDE was that it doesn’t use GTK, like Gnome does, and that it’s not terribly popular because nearly everything ends up using GTK eventually.
Am I really that out of touch? No. It’s the children who are wrong.
No, can’t agree, Gnome is the greasy kid stuff.
I agree with that. I use only LXDE as my desktop environment (or FLWM if I’m using a really low-powered computer).
Yeah, one of Stevey’s drunken rants’ relayed a discussion he had with a perl programmer while he was still at Amazon .. “dude, not everything is an object” .. with the exception of a gui interface where just about everything is an object and C++ is and should be the first choice :-)
Just doing my part to raise awareness.
Materials.
Household furniture should be solid wood, not veneer on fibreboard. For smaller objects, stone, glass, wood, ceramic, and a variety of metals can be acceptable depending on the application. Since getting into 3D printing I’m also warming up to thermoplastics. And sometimes it’s three-one-six stainless or nothing. The key is really that some thought (besides cheapness) should go into the choice of material.
Ketchup: Heinz or nothing. I’m sure there are some gourmet ketchups out there, but I haven’t seen them. It’s no wonder I grew up hating most things at home that used ketchup: Mom usually bought Hunt’s, because it’s cheaper.
Heinz is out because of John Kerry. Buy it if you must, commie traitor.