Last week The New York Times gave readers a taste of the ridiculous extremes to which Cupid has subjected us all. An article on luxury gift-giving examined the price and production of a standard box of Noka chocolates. While the $2,000/pound price revelation fell short of earth-shaking, even I was a little sad to learn that the advertised "rare, handcrafted, single-estate chocolate truffles" are "molded" blobs of wholesale chocolate, of hazy geographic origin.
First unveiled by a Dallas food blog, the story was picked up and carried cross-country by a slew of popular websites before hitting the Times. Presumably a drop in Noka sales will follow. But the Times put displeased consumer response into perspective. After all, when it comes to luxury goods, especially gifts, doesn't the unfathomable price fulfill an important function?
As I idly worked my way through two bags of Hershey's kisses, wishing they were Godiva, a more interesting question came to mind: What does the Noka debacle say about widespread price dysfunction? While NoKA (a spicy twist on the names of founders "Noah" and "Katherine") has broken rules in the eyes of the consumer collective, the husband-and-wife duo was just unlucky. They fed and fed off the perceived link between price and brag-worthy purchase. Their single mistake was ignoring our lingering, albeit antiquated trust in the correlation between price and quality.
You and I are cynical, largely uncritical consumers; we will absorb sticker shock in stride for the critter stuck to your chest and the label sewn to my behind. Not exactly newsworthy. But if your Polo shirt comes apart at the seams, you will make a fuss before returning to the store to buy another one. We recognize our own brand-consciousness as we stroke our Uggs or Escalade, but we have a hint of old-world faith in dollar denominations of quality. A faith that is being undermined categorically by clever marketing that turns it on its head.
Smart packaging is the new millenium's fastest developing technology. Shrinkwrap is a thing of the past. Packaging and product have fused. If it looks like angora and feels like angora, it's probably a wool and nylon blend. But if the tag is carefully worded and the price sufficiently painful, you may never know the difference.
Simply put, retailers are taking advantage of the brand-and-catchphrase craze at a faster rate, incredibly, than buyers are buying it. We cutting-edge consumers are actually, like, totally 20th century. We like to consider fresh-squeezed orange juice fresh and squeezed, genuine leather procured from cows, chocolate made from cocoa beans and Haagen-Dazs somehow linked to Holland, not the Bronx from whence it sprang. The list of unrealistic expectations goes on. But we don't know what we're eating, wearing, riding or sleeping on anymore. And paying more provides no quality guarantees. The second part is what disturbs us.
Michael Pollan's immensely popular book, the Omnivore's Dilemma, pokes unsettlingly at how organic and whole Whole Foods' offerings really are. Lawsuits are forcing Capri Sun and 7-Up to drop the snazzy "all-natural" catchphrase from their product descriptions.
Last November, ABC News reported "Good Morning America" had bought and dismantled furniture items from several popular stores and brands. The only thing experts found the Martha Steward "cherry night table," Ashley "maple nightstand" and $350 "solidly constructed" Glen Eagle "brown cherry desk" had in common: no wood. Materials miraculously ranged from fiberboard to contact paper.
It's not just our egos or sense of humor or future heirlooms at stake here. We use prices to gauge what is reliable, healthy, imported, quality. Disagree? According to the Times, a 17.6-percent tuition increase at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania yielded a 35 percent bigger freshman class within four years, a visible trend in college education, that luxury good.
And if you pride yourself on quiet quality and can afford overpriced, understated elegance-well, you might consider adjusting your refined tastes to reflect reality. No longer are you afforded the private assurance that you are wearing abstract art. It may be that you've donned the flexible equivalent of fiberboard.
Because the age of subtle elegance is kaput. The age of even vaguely understanding what goes into our mouths is kaput. Wikipedia waits on us hand and foot, yet it has become impossible to confirm whether the mahogany table that is your mother's pride and joy is really a stained and sculpted block of compressed woodchips, playground variety.
Take comfort, for you will never know. Not without taking a hacksaw to your environment. Until that desperate moment, at the glorified heights of the Information Age, we drown in a deluge of unanswerable questions: Who am I? What are my values? How do I prefer to indulge? What animal am I really wearing on my head?
Google provides no satisfactory answers. Or so I concluded after multiple attempts at revising the terms of my search.
Money is a universal language. Love is a universal language. Mid-February the stars align and the two are supposed to become one. But if you're frantically looking up same-day shipping at this very moment, worry not. Because this Valentine's Day it really is the thought that counts, in an age when nothing else does. Not even the once-mighty dollar.
Jane Chong is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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