Pointless But It Does My Head In

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Slothrop said:
But
a) there's no way I can prove that my pleasure in eating the cheese is genuine and authentic and instinctive and isn't a response I've conditioned into myself because I've come to believe that liking expensive cheese is something I ought to do...
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I see where you're coming from but I think going down this route can only lead to crippling self-doubt and quite possibly madness. If you like Product A better than Product B, and can afford the difference in cases where A is more expensive than B, then buy Product A. I don't see any benefit in having some great analysis over whether the pleasure derived thereby is 'authentic' or not.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Yes, I agree. But then we seem quite happy to do the same thing for other people, and judge that they're only waffling on about some expensive artisan coffee shop because they're pretentious twats participating in a display of upper middle class consumerist oneupmanship, and not because they actually do get more pleasure from the coffee...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
But what if the coffee really is better than in Starbuck's, which surely at least plausible? Can you tell just by looking that they're paying more for this fancy coffee for the 'wrong' reasons?
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Slothrop said:
Yeah, that's the point I was trying to make.
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Oh OK, I think I misunderstood your stance.

I had the misfortune to read a Janet Street-Porter piece a few years back, the gist of which was "if you eat nice food it's because you're a horrible middle-class snob who hates poor people". Fucksake.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Mr. Tea said:
But what if the coffee really is better than in Starbuck's, which surely at least plausible? Can you tell just by looking that they're paying more for this fancy coffee for the 'wrong' reasons?
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I'm sure it is better than Starbucks, but then Starbucks' coffee is legendarily awful. At least to me!

They basically are serving pretty much what they served before (which was reasonably priced), and then jacking the price up by describing it as 'artisan'. That's what I object to, cos then it results in everyone having to pay more. Again, it's another way of extracting as much profit as possible from people, by tapping into their insecurities about cheap things being rubbish (and wanting to distinguish themselves in their 'lifestyle' choices). I agree that it's possible the coffee lives up to the price, but in my experience it's very rare that 'the more you pay, the better the product' holds very much at all; far more frequently it's an emperor's new clothes situation. I've eaten in some terrible expensive restaurants....

Although thinking about it more, I still haven't watched that documentary on how awful/oppressive most of the coffee industry is (called something like 'Black Gold'), which will prob put me off drinking coffee full stop....
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Well if it costs more without an appreciable increase in quality that's just a straight-up rip off, before you get into any culture-war arguments about conspicuous consumption or snob value.

But yes, some people will assume they're consuming a high-quality product just because they're paying more for it. If this only affected the idiots concerned then I wouldn't mind, but it can end up ruining things for those of us who taste things with their tastebuds and not their wallets.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Agreed. It's the knock-on effect that's irritating, the homogenisation of the clientele too, and the exclusion of people who can't afford stupid prices (whereas I'm more in the category of choosing not to afford it, I admit; in the case of coffee, rather than expensive restaurants, which baffle me as to the number of people who can seemingly afford to spend a weekly food bill on one meal).
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Is it more baffling than people who'll spend a weekly food bill on one night out clubbing, though? The main difference as far as I can tell is that we're culturally accustomed to the idea that it's normal for someone who goes for an expensive night out clubbing to have saved all week for it, but for someone who goes to an expensive restaurant to just have that sort of money to chuck around at will.

I dunno, I think what does my head in (or possibly makes me chuckle to myself) about the whole thing is the faddishness of the extraneous stuff - like, there are people who will make a good cup of coffee or nice cheese or good food and price it accordingly, and people who'll charge over the odds for fairly ordinary coffee or boring cheese or average food, and they'll both probably continue to do so in much the same fashion regardless, but the surrounding nonsense - decor, sales pitch, all the little signifiers - have to change with the season to avoid ending up looking "a bit late-nineties" or people assuming that you're not up to scratch because you've still got bare wooden floors when all the really good places have gone back to carpets...
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Absolutely - I understand going out on Friday or Saturday to shell out all your money on a restaurant meal if that's your preferred way of going out (though too often I feel it's not worth it if I do that), it's more that a lot of expensive restaurants are packed out even on weekdays**. It's like if Fabric were open on a Tuesday (it probably is, but you know what I mean), and people were throwing £50 around. How can people afford to do that? Obviously I know...all goes back to huge inequity in salaries.

At the same time, the amount of money I've seen some people blow in a night's clubbing is similarly gobsmacking...maybe that's why I never got into cocaine...

Agreed about the faddishness. In the true Dissensus vein, I'm quite fond of formica.

** Disclaimer: Personally I prefer eating in places that are slightly more laid back, so I do have something against expensive restaurants to begin with. Last time I went somewhere expensive, some horrific woman was being snooty towards my girlfriend (we laughed it off, but hey, still irritating), and I just thought...we paid for this? Food was distinctly average too.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
ive never had good food in an expensive resturaunt but that might be a vegetarian thing. probably just give me shit to spite me. coffee for what its worth is pretty easy to do badly. starbucks for example keep reusing the same milk and it gets a bit burnt. the filters are baskets arent cleaned out regularly, little things like that that to me are objectively bad leaving aside roast profiles and more esoteric stuff like that. having said that a good barista has the same routine to go through a bad one and it should never take 1o minutes to make one cup of coffee. two minutes maybe.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
luka said:
ive never had good food in an expensive resturaunt but that might be a vegetarian thing. probably just give me shit to spite me. coffee for what its worth is pretty easy to do badly. starbucks for example keep reusing the same milk and it gets a bit burnt. the filters are baskets arent cleaned out regularly, little things like that that to me are objectively bad leaving aside roast profiles and more esoteric stuff like that. having said that a good barista has the same routine to go through a bad one and it should never take 1o minutes to make one cup of coffee. two minutes maybe.
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Most of the time I'd rather make my own coffee than risk buying it and getting stuff that tastes more like dishwater than coffee. That said, in places like Spain and Italy I've only ever had good coffee experiences out.

Would've thought that possibly veggie food in expensive restaurants would've possibly been a better bet than meat, cos they can't fob you off with an expensive-sounding cut of flesh (which tastes like what you bought at Sainsburys the previous day) and some pretentious potatoes. Then again, with all the great veggie food you can get for next to nothing, why bother going to an expensive place?
 
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
what a difference a few years make...

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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
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jenks

jenks

thread death
They lived here in Leigh on Sea, he died in a nursing home just up the road - my wife kind of knew some of them when she was growing up - said they were famously bonkers.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Josie Long's naif and charmingly quirky cartoons:

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Oops, did I say "naif and charmingly quirky"? Sorry, I meant "risibly infantile", always get those confused.

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You can just tell she has a kitchen full of mugs and teapots and stuff decorated with primary-colour stick figures and smiling flowers.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Being forced to listen to my MP3 player at work by co-worker chewing gum louder than should be physical possible for a human being.
 
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