Most people I know of who buy luxury watches or handbags say they’re a good store of value and can fetch a high resale price in the future. If the market mostly consists of people who buy them for the sole purpose of reselling, wouldn’t that make it a purely speculatively priced item, akin to crypto? How has the luxury market not collapsed?
In: Economics
There are more than one kind of luxury item, but the most common is the status symbol one. People buy them *because* of the price tag, to show off, because they have nothing else to show off with. The best exemple of this are probably Rolex watches. They’re good, but you can get muuuuuuuuuuuch better watches for that price. They *are* status symbols, though, in part because they are still cheap enough that you don’t need to really be rich to get one.
The real luxury items are mostly from brands you’ve never heard of, who do small scale artisanal production, and they often aren’t even that expensive for the quality they offer. The accent there is put on the experience of what you touch: quality fabrics, leathers, finishings…
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