Lines outside Louis Vuitton are more down-market, aspirational luxury - an ultra-wealthy person wouldn't be caught dead queuing on a sidewalk. Patek and Ferrari operate at the level above, where the signal isn't wealth but access. (HBS calls Ferrari's version "deprivation marketing.")
Is it a game worth bothering with? Enough people think so to sustain billion-dollar brands.
(Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience)
There’s a great number of people with 100+M and even far beyond that who enjoy nobody knowing just what kind of wealth they have. This doesn’t mean looking poor, but there’s plenty of value in anonymity.
Stealthy, like a submarine.
Having the most expensive item in some category, or close to it, often gets you news coverage, which is something a normal purchase can't really offer.
They might pass the time doing those things, but not as a mere passtime or hobby, like if they were sewing or playing CoD. Unlike those, doing them and telling about doing them serves a specific social purpose.
But I don't view hobbies as that separate from status signals within the hobbying group. Oh you play games? What games? Did you beat it? etc etc.
Esoteric knowledge/practices here are status signls (Oh you reached shattered planet without xyz??).
That starts to sound a lot like "Oh you aquired a lambo XYZ without usual steps abc" and that's a really fun convo in the in-group, and a total miss with the out-group.
The difference though is that this is not meant to serve "within the hobbying group".
They serves the status signal purpose when showing them to "laymen" and other rich people in general, not necessarily to other expensive car buyers or luxury watch buyers.
In other words, the, typically quiet, flaunting, is done to people otherwise uninterested about the specific ting, that nonetheless recognize the exclusivity and the knowledge that it's a subtle signal of "elevated taste" and that they belong to the tasteful-rich club.
(Well, the way that _some_ people play Magic: The Gathering does - but I wouldn't want to play with anyone who raised a stink about proxies)
As for fonts etc: https://hobancards.com/blogs/thoughts-and-curiosities/americ...
This could be explained away by them working for the same place and assuming to contact them you call the same switchboard and ask for the person, but even back in the 90s it would have been strange for wall street "Vice Presidents" (even if it was somewhat of a ceremonial title) to not have their own unique business number.
Also, Paul Allen giving his card to someone else with the same contact number for the purposes of being in touch to plan to play squash doesn't make much sense unless you get meta and assume Paul Allen was aware this had no practical value and just wanted to ego-drop the card.
It's called relationship-based allocation or more simply purchase history requirement, and its practiced by both Patek and Rolex but add to the list famously Hermes, Bugatti, high jewelry from VCA/Bulgari etc, getting access to prestigious artists at galleries, etc.
The devil's advocate/ other side of the coin is that it's not just a moneygrab, it protects the brand image by controlling who is seen wearing / using your products. When the value of these goods is so influenced by who else has them, that kind of control is intrinsically important for the seller.
From a birds-eye view it's less a hedonistic treadmill and more a feeding frenzy.
It's a game you can play, but for the life of me, I cannot comprehend why you'd want to, there are so many other better things in life.
>>> Why bother?
Exactly - go give someone you love a hug, that's worth infinitely more than flexing an expensive watch.
Apart from the KYC aspect of the process it's their way of solving the problem of artificial scarcity on the second-hand market as the article explains. They want a second hand market to exist to indicate that this is a luxury item, but too many and the price tanking with excess supply.
I've got three Oceanus watches (Casio's boutique brand). I never wear them, anymore, because of Apple Watch.
I brought a couple of them in Japan. There, the G-Shock brand is very popular. They sell G-Shock watches for ridiculously (to Americans, who are used to cheap G-Shocks) high prices.
This status-through-martyrdom ritual to get it from retail at MSRP is utterly bizarre.
[1] https://www.chrono24.com/patekphilippe/nautilus--mod106.htm
I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
A classic case is when you observe teenager targeted status signalling trends. This can be as low value as an expensive shirt, ie shirts branded ‘supreme’ costing $300 which isn’t worth signalling to anyone who pays rent or a mortgage. But to a teenager? Wow man $300! such status!!! On the flip side if we see someone above teenager age wearing such teenager targeted status symbols we reasonably subconsciously assume they live with their parents and have very little income.
This continues up the wealth chain forever. Status symbols are invariably a way to see just how little people actually have because the person wearing the status symbol clearly believes the value of what they are flaunting is impressive.
Status symbols aren’t a signal of how much money you have so much as signal of what you believe to be an incredible amount of wealth to flaunt.
half a million for a car sounds absurd to me, but it's 0.5% of $100M. Compare that to $50k car on a ~$200k median net-worth US household.
If you're comfortably middle class and in a demographic recognized to "deserve" to be middle class, then you can afford to be oblivious to a whole lot of class signaling. You aren't striving to reach a higher station, and you aren't likely to get demoted out of your current one, so you can mostly ignore it.
People that are lower-class and trying to move up, or in demographic categories that are often shunned access to higher social classes don't have that luxury and are incentivized to be savvy to this kind of stuff.
This is one of the kinds of things that people talk about when they talk about "privilege". It's not that you should feel bad because you don't have to worry about this stuff. It's just an acknowledgement that some people have the privilege of not having to worry about this stuff because they were born into a level of class security that others lack.
You can have that heavy weight while living on the suburbs or even the ghetto too. The objects are prices mostly change with the wealth level, not the game.
ego, of course
This is so silly. Do you really not have any hobbies where you spend inordinate time or money on things you could objectively accomplish quicker and cheaper, but having less fun, in other ways? Like, I ski. It’s a silly way to get up and down a hill in the 21st century.
I’m not a watch guy. But mechanical watches are beautiful. There are idiots who buy them. But that doesn’t mean everyone who does is an idiot.
At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches.
A watch at $80,000 is what, 10,000x what a new cheap one is?
But good for them! It’s really hard to be angry at them for buying said watch without it being some form of jealousy.
Sure. To each their own. I drive a Subaru. I don’t think it’s weird that others like a nice car. (I also think there are douchebags who drive both.)
What a tired aphorism. Just like PG's 50 year old insights.