None of those are apt comparisons because people don't pay for the brand signaling.

Laptop stickers and conference shirts are free or dirt cheap. The logos you see in a coffee shop on electronics are side effects of purchasing the product. I would still buy an MBP without the lighted apple on the back because I'm buying it for it's utility and quality. Nobody would buy a Gucci bag without the logo.

Social signaling through brands is not as common as you would like to believe. This can be seen by how many people buy clothes that are close to cost (Gap, Walmart, etc).

Walmart has a lot of good basic clothes but a lot of people -- even people who aren't particularly rich -- just wouldn't dream of buying clothes there because it has blue-collar associations. This is really just one element of the rich tapestry of signals a person gives you as to their social class (clothes and language are probably the most distinctive and immediately noticeable signifiers).

Meh, that's not my experience with middle class folks. The only complaints I would hear about Walmart stuff is bad fits, etc.

I think you're referring to upper middle class people, which is a much smaller portion of the population.

I never said anything about money being required for social signaling. If you're signaling that you spend a lot of money, then you need to spend a lot of money.

If, however, you're signaling that you're a serious engineer who doesn't care about fashion, you wear and do other things. This also doesn't need to be consciously considered to still be happening. Ask yourself why so many engineers who work in air conditioned offices wear hoodies but never put the hood up. At the core, social signaling is about saying "I belong to this group" and possibly "I'm high-status within this group". For whatever value group takes on for (the rhetorical) you.

Edit: There's also the problem of it being the fashion, especially outside the fashion crowd, to talk about how much one doesn't care about fashion or signaling. Which is in itself frequently a kind of signaling.

A good way to tie the money and non money aspects of signaling is to change the definition capital. Sure there's financial capital, but also social capital (who you know can often be an asset) and intellectual capital (i.e. what you know).

Different groups have different methods of valuing the different types of capital, so the serious engineer example can be someone who has a lot of one type, an an average amount of the other types of capital. Basically just a paraphrasing of the signaling point but a useful model nevertheless IMO.

Sorry, that doesn't fit the narrative because there isn't one brand associated with hoodies. You can pickup a hoodie for close to cost in almost any city. If there were 10,000 different companies that made products indistinguishable from Gucci, then you might have an argument.

You seem stuck on money, so I'll repeat this with a slight expansion.

I never said anything about money being required for social signaling. If you're signaling that you spend a lot of money, then you need to spend a lot of money. There are other kinds of status one signals, money and brands is just one example.

I'm referring to brands because you said this:

>You think using brands to signal status isn't normal?

We're not talking about social signaling in general. You are the one who mentioned brands and tried to imply everyone was doing it because you can see lots of brands. I pointed out why that was bogus and now you are changing the subject to social signaling in general, which is not the topic.