Nobody Is Fooling Anybody
Oren John (@orenmeetsworld) has been documenting something worth paying attention to. Kids buying twenty-eight dollar Lamborghini key fobs to leave on the coffee shop table. Empty designer bags off Etsy. Day passes posted from the locker room. His read is that they're performing a life they don't have, openly, as a game, and that the joke is on whoever paid retail.
He's right about the behavior. I read the motive differently.
Because the same person leaving that key fob on the table is also posting the dollar fifty Costco hot dog, and not ironically. They're hunting the black Kirkland crew neck, the plain one with the embroidered logo, which resells for a hundred and fifty dollars on eBay. Same account. Same week. And if Costco put Nikes on a pallet next to the paper towels, they would buy those too and post that.
That is not aspiration. Aspiration only points up. This points in both directions at once, which means it was never about wealth.
What's actually happened is that price stopped carrying the signal. For most of commercial history, the number told you what something meant. Expensive meant scarce, or difficult, or protected. That was the whole contract. Now the number tells you almost nothing, because the signal detached from the transaction. It costs twenty-eight dollars to borrow a hundred years of Lamborghini equity, and it costs four dollars to hold something Costco spent decades making trustworthy. Both work. Both get the same reaction in the comments.
So the flex moved. It isn't what you can afford anymore. It's whether you can tell what's good.
That's a literacy flex, and it's brutal for brands, because you can't buy your way out of it. You can discount, seed, gift, and code your way to volume, and none of it makes you legible. Meanwhile Kirkland, which has no story, no campaign, and deliberately unremarkable packaging, produces a hundred and fifty dollar resale market on a sweatshirt. Nobody was tricked into that. People know exactly what it is. That's the point. They know, and they want the thing they can vouch for.
Which reframes the whole panic about the death of luxury. Luxury isn't dying. It just lost its monopoly on meaning something. A hot dog and a Birkin now compete in the same category, and the category is not price, it's confidence.
And the people who understand this best are the ones the industry keeps describing as fooling themselves. They're not confused. They're the most fluent consumers who have ever existed. They can read a signal in either direction and they'll take whichever one lands hardest that day.
The brands in trouble are the ones still asking to be trusted because of what they charge.
