PS3, Chocolate
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007So I was reading an article about the collapse of the PS3 prices on ebay, where at one time the systems were selling for two thousand bucks and are now selling for just a little over what the auctioners had paid themselves… even though, to this day, very few stores have the systems on shelves.
For some reason it brought to mind this oddly fascinating story about Noka, a place that sells ultra high-end chocolates to stupid people with too much money (a box of sixteen chocolates is about $200). What the story reveals is that Noka is simply buying chocolate from a supplier, melting it, pouring it into tiny molds and marking it up as much as SEVEN THOUSAND PERCENT.
Then, for some reason, both of these reminded me of the news that they’re probably going to start taxing virtual goods soon, as in the imaginary stuff you own in online multiplayer games like Second Life and World of Warcraft. That got me to thinking about actual value of goods versus perceived value (after all, the $2,300 paid for those PS3’s bought nothing except “I played it first” bragging rights, since they could have just waited two months and gotten one off the shelf).
I then wondered what percentage of money in this economy is exchanged for actual goods, and what percentage is exchanged for goods with purely imaginary value (jeans with a certain label, $100 sneakers) and as I sat down to contemplate the matter, I remembered I own a Wii and I went and played it instead.
