The Fancy Rug Dilemma
(epan.land)45 points by ericpan64 4 days ago
45 points by ericpan64 4 days ago
Creating a single basketball shoe from an existing template takes three hours. Coming up with that design and all the associated expenses (marketing etc) plus the tooling needed to produce the shoe consumes much more labor and accounts for the vast majority of the shoe's cost.
Hand-woven rugs, on the other hand, are largely unique in design and created by a single person.
Is there an unspoken assumption here that value is absolute and deviations pathological?
I can't understand how heirloom quality is abstract any more than say color scheme.
How is valuing a sneaker collection more abstract than valuing, say, minimalism or utilitarianism?
I've re-read the post multiple times, but I'm clearly missing something basic to allow comprehension.
It would be case by case for me. In a sense, all of them stem from identity. Another lens to explore this is effects: what first, second third order effects would a sneaker collection have versus minimalism? Some are more functional than others.
I have to ask... why the extra lettuce? At In-N-Out I sometimes ask for less lettuce because I feel like it's unnecessary filler compared to the other ingredients, lol. Maybe they've just been giving my unused lettuce to you...
Merging all the dimensions of the question into Value as a function of Cost seems part of the challenge.
Value is such a subjective concept. You finally get down to "We all need things transcending pure utility, connecting us to stories bigger than ourselves." at the end of the post.
Even if "bigger than ourselves" takes on some explicit religious angle--thinking the Amish here--there is still copious room to dislike the fact that the Amish are rolling around in "them new-fangled buggies" instead of being on foot like they were in the Good Book.
I think part of the Amish line of thought is instead of randomly and quickly adopting technology/growth a community should take time to understand what the impacts are of using them.
Some people think Amish don't use electricity, but that's not true. You'll find quite a few of them with things like solar panels and LED lights. These things tend to have very long lifespans and no grid connections limiting needs from outsiders.
This is not really Veblen situation. A lot of these are primarily money laundering outfits, the artificially high prices, are simply a means of converting cash into bank deposits. Similar schemes exist in art, sculptures, and jewelry. There are some mom and pop type stores that are legit and some of the money goes to actual artists who make these but the ones in Palo Alto (or similarly unattainable rent neighborhood rug shops), are not that.
That’s internet lore. Nobody is buying a $50,000 rug with cash. If any of the people were, the rug guy wouldn’t have a place to bank. Reality is you can move a few rugs a month and make ok money.
There’s a market for these types of businesses. In my area there’s a dude with a company that sells and maintains $50-150k+ Christmas light and decoration displays. He has ~100 customers. The men’s clothing place I go to is a group of guys hanging out having a good time - it doesn’t look busy, but their 4-5 customers a day are dropping $3-10k/visit.
Stores like that are “laundering” money like the rest of the commercial real estate world… by playing games with various (legal) tax schemes. They are no more illegal than a Hampton Inn or AirBnb guy.
Real money laundering places are restaurant/bar, laundromats, arcades, and low income residential.
Tax schemes are there to save taxes using legalism loopholes, these places are happy to pay the taxes on "cash" purchases to bank the proceeds. Nobody is buying 50K rugs is correct, most of the transactions are self reported for the purpose of paying taxes and depositing funds. IRS and fincen are not in it together, in fact IRS encourages people to pay taxes on ill gotten gains.
I thought those stores are basically hobbies for the wealthy local commercial landowners that own the building(s). They may anecdotally also be money laundering. They don't need to actually be a profitable business. The only cost to run it is basically lost rent for that space.
There are so many of them that I've always kinda suspected this, yea. I maybe-literally never saw anyone in any of them across a few years prior to COVID (despite working near enough to two that I saw them multiple times a day). But at the prices they go for I suppose they might only need to sell ~two a month if they got them for dirt cheap somehow, and owned the property or were grandfathered into extremely low rent? Or one person furnishing a mansion a year.
Sure, let's take a rug as an example. I don't think there is one breakpoint. I think there are a set of axis of quality you invest into, roughly sequentially, as you go up the price scale of objects:
- $50 - Something rug-shaped exists
- $100 - Durability
- $200 - Materials
- $500 - Comfort and design
- $1000 - Basic craftsmanship
- $2000 - Refinement of craft
- $5000 - Artistry & identity
- $10000 - Tradition
- $20000 - Mastery
- $50000 - Rarity/historical importance
- $100000+ - ?
Because most people don't cross-shop $20k rugs and $200 rugs, most people are focused on one or two aspects around their personal budget. The essayist mentioned being amazing by the craftsmanship and artistry (see scale above). A broke college student might just want something that holds up in their dorm room and see what materials it's made out of and comfort as meaningless and abstract. And a billionaire shopping for a rug for their office might take everything other than rarity/historical importance as a given and just be thinking about that.
I think there is a large cognitive bias to consider everything you can easily afford "tangible and important improvements" and everything you can't as "abstract"!
It’s thirteen years old now (2012), but there’s a fascinating old Forbes article (from when, I think, it was a respectable publication) about the cross-pollination between Palo Alto’s rug dealers, and Palo Alto’s venture capitalists:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/03/21/silic...
I realize the OP was using rugs as a metaphor, but they are works of art, just as much as samurai swords would be for Japan.
Rugs were prized in nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures like Iran, where all your valuables had to be mobile. Traditional rugs require many, many hours of craftsmanship and are indeed works of art with deep cultural resonance. Turkmenistan even features a rug on its national flag.
Sadly, also a dying art despite its millennia of history as most rug weavers in Iran or Turkey have better options in factories or jobs. For the moment dirt-poor areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Tibet still weave, but the future is machine-woven rugs from China, possibly with machines deliberately designed to mimic the imperfections of hand-woven ones.
I can’t speak for the rugs you viewed, but some products take literally hundreds of man hours to make.
My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan.
In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass produced and apparently consume around 3 hours of direct labour. You could have many tens or even hundreds of those basketball shoes for the labour value of a moderately size Afghan rug.