tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post2947061692279127805..comments2024-03-28T00:11:33.489-04:00Comments on bensozia: The King of Self-PromotionJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01037215533094998996noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-69531642206965439092016-09-21T01:06:43.454-04:002016-09-21T01:06:43.454-04:00"On the other hand, everyone agrees the food ..."On the other hand, everyone agrees the food is amazing. So if the status-crazed foodies who trek to Baehrel's basement feel like they are getting their money's worth, what is he doing wrong?"<br /><br />Well, the obvious immediate answer is that he's lying to people. The trouble is, it often feels like people these days don't much value the truth anyway, so if you lie to them in a way that doesn't outrage them, they'll often excuse it out of hand.<br /><br />This guy sounds like a conman, cleverly running a completely legal confidence game.<br /><br />You couldn't do this in most fields of business - if you try to sell most things at absurd prices by making outrageous and clearly false claims, you end up in hot water. But in the food industry, where nearly all measures of quality and value are completely subjective, so long as you can dupe people into willingly paying your prices, no one will ever object.<br /><br />Clearly this guy is exploiting known human biases and fallacious thinking. People - even experts - can't tell the difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a $100 one. More than that, people will also enjoy a bottle wine more if they're simply told it is more expensive, even if it actually isn't. And even with food itself, identical meals produce substantially different ratings of satisfaction dependent simply on things like how they're arranged on the plates.<br /><br />So this conman lies to people. He exploits their confidence in him, manipulates their biases, and engages in social engineering to turn an undeserved profit. He's selling ordinary food on par with plenty of other restaurants, but by taking advantage of flaws in human psychology, he can charge absurdly high prices and get away with it.<br /><br />It's a classic snake oil sale - it doesn't matter that the product itself isn't anything special, so long as you can fool people into believing that is, then you can convince them to pay a small fortune for something effectively worthless.G. Verlorennoreply@blogger.com