For $300, I can get an incredible several-hours long meal in a fantastic space, with devoted, engaging service. I'll have a great experience, memories forever, and inspiration for my own cooking. My friends will want to hear all about it. It's practically a half-day vacation.
It's reasonable for people that aren't super wealthy to save a bit and splurge for an experience like that every now and then.
This is a fucking chocolate bar. If I tell me friends I spent $300 on a chocolate bar, they will think I'm a crazy person.
Maybe there are some restaurants for russian oligarchs and other people with bad taste and too much money, but unless you go crazy on the wine (which they keep around for just such guests) all the 2 and 3-star restaurants I've been to have been 10-25 times more expensive than mcDonalds,not 100-250 times.
Wine is tricky, the taste is complex,the experience depends so much on what you are or have been eating, temperature, the glass, and I suppose the ambience, and is a rather strong (upper-middle) class marker,so even so-so expensive wines are given much benefit of a doubt.
I think a $300 candy bar is stupid, but it’s objectively got no less utility than a $300 meal. You could eat a meal of rice and beans with a $300 candy bar for dessert and from a health and satiety standpoint you’ve probably equaled the $300 meal. The difference is the subjective experience.
A really small group with a lot of money is still worth paying attention to. Think about it like this, you wouldn't want to miss giving them a chance to spend that money. As the article says "To’ak chocolates—requires good storytelling". At that point it is all about storytelling. If you're selling a phone case, they are not buying just a wooden phone case, they are buying a hand crafted and polished product that came from an ancient jungles of South America, it was blessed by the shamans, and painted with pigment from crushed beetles etc.
Rich people will often look for ways (not necessarily conspicuous) of asserting their status. Spending money of frivolities like these is giving them a chance to do so. Many will understand that maybe all those claims are mostly bullshit, but they'll still buy it. Maybe just to show it off to their friends, give it as a gift, or flash it around their poor relatives and remind them what they'll never be able to afford.
The point is that non-rich do that, too. Most people buying luxuries are not ultra-rich. $300 dollar chocolate is not out of reach for the upper-middle class, or really even the regular middle class. It might be a dumb purchase, but you could realistically earn less than $50k/year and still buy a bar of this.
I would imagine that my peers make up a much larger portion of To’ak's clientele than Warren Buffet's peers.
The trick is too keep your price just under what someone living paycheck to paycheck might decide to spend on a special occassion. 300 is right in the middle of that range, the sort of thing one might buy as a special present.
I think the ultra wealthy abhor those restaurants. I would imagine by that amount of money you would have private cooks.
There is really no predicted risk for anyone on a $300 chocolate bar. You spend the money and get a chocolate bar. If it’s the best chocolate bar in the world, great. If it’s junk, that sucks. Either way your $300 is gone.