It's hard to make the right boots analogy (try it yourself if you think you can), but to speak of fridges —

• The rich person's remodeller (or the developer of the house they buy) buys a commercial-kitchen prep fridge for the house's kitchen. This is a big, powerful, durable, repairable, no-frills, utilitarian fridge, that could be viewed as attractive or ugly depending on your opinion on brutalism. The rich person never sees this fridge. It's kept in the butler's pantry and only their private chef ever touches it.

• The rich person's interior designer then buys an elegant/classy half-sized in-wall glass-door fridge to live in the kitchen itself. This is intended for the rich person's household staff to keep constantly stocked with snacks and drinks for the rich person to grab. (Also, if the rich person thinks they want to cook one day, the staff will prep the exact ingredients needed in advance, keeping them in the butler's pantry until called for, but will then stage any "must stay cold" ingredients here.) This fridge is generally a piece of shit, made with huge markups by companies that make fancy-house furniture. But it sure is pretty! If (when) it fails, the staff can temporarily revert to just serving the role of that fridge, running to the butler's-pantry fridge or other cold-storage area (maybe a walk-in!) when the rich person wants something. (Also compare/contrast: in-wall wine cooler.)

• The rich person's household staff might respond to the rich person's request for more convenient access to snacks/drinks in certain areas of the house by buying + keeping stocked one or more minifridges. There'll certainly be one in the house's bar. (There's always a bar.) These are sturdy commercial-grade bricks, built by the same companies that build the ones that go into hotels; but these companies serve rich people just as often as they serve hotels, so they tend to have an up-market marque that makes the fridge look fancy while reusing the well-engineered core.

Parent was funny but almost a non-sequitor.

I appreciated the kernel of truth: industrial fridges will not come with adware in the foreseeable future. Buy industrial.

I mean, my point was that there are actually three different ways you can spend a lot of money on a fridge, and it's a lot like with PCs.

You can buy:

• a big ugly powerful repairable/durable industrial one (like a server);

• an average-sized, somewhat-fancy (because high-trim), repairable/durable commercial one (like a workstation);

• or an average-sized fancy "aesthetic" one, made by a design company rather than an appliance company, that isn't repairable or durable (like one of those bespoke "sleeper desk PCs.")

The same goes for most things you can spend a lot of money on. A sound system, a vacuum cleaner, a car, etc. In each of these cases, "premium" has these same three distinct meanings. None of which involve showing you ads. But all of which have their own trade-offs. And all of which are usually quite a bit more expensive (each for their own reasons) than the highest-trim product sold directly to the average consumer by what you'd think of as a "consumer brand."

What are the good brands of commercial/industrial we should be looking at?

I think it depends on the field or industry. I seem to remember seeing commercial TVs by Samsung when we were buying ours. Similar display specs, almost twice the price, no smarts, and 5 years warranty. They were designed for hotels I believe and came with a few features for that. Similarly hospitality aimed brands often are designed to withstand more abuse and cost a bit more. If you like whatever product you encounter or use in a commercial setting, just ask about it. There’s a decent chance you’ll be able to buy something similar.

Oh also, for vacuums at least, shop vacs are apparently the way to go. And for audio, DIY beats the pants off anything commercial (unless you don’t mind spending thousands of dollars more).

For fridges? True Manufacturing.

I once bought a commercial dishwasher. It cost twice as much used as a domestic dishwasher would have cost new, and I had to add a 220 outlet and run some new plumbing; but the kitchen in that house had no space for a normal dishwasher, so I had to be creative. I put the big machine on my back porch, just outside the kitchen door: it was ugly, loud, and absurdly fast. Once it came up to temperature, it could wash a tray of dishes in three minutes flat. Great for cleaning up after dinner parties. It was certainly a kind of luxury, in a brute-force way.

Buying industrial works in many circumstances:

- consumer kitchen mops break in 1-2 years. Get the commercial one for 2x and it lasts

- my bike is locked to an 25mm thick toughened steel industrial eye-bolt (set into concrete) which cost < $10. A consumer item intended for that purpose costs ~$70

You're talking about a _very_ rich person, there. Most merely rich people don't have household staff.

If you can't afford a household staff (even just a single person), you aren't actually rich. Very well off perhaps but not rich.

"You are so poor that when AWS goes down, you still can get into your house" -- seen somewhere

Which phase of capitalism is this? Suffering costs extra, and you'll gladly pay for it!

"As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’" - 1984

Isn't that reversed now? You can only afford the device that is subsidized by the analytics you will be generating for them while the rich person can afford to by the non-subsidized version.

No, these are US$3500 fridges.

$3500 is about 1/3 of the cost of a "rich person" fridge.

There's quite a spectrum of richness. I think my fridge cost US$100 used. This new 199-liter model costs US$280 new: https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/heladera-philco-top-mount-ci...

So US$3500 is 12 times the cost of a poor-person fridge (excluding used fridges and "oh, I just go over to my mom's house") and ⅓ the cost of your rich-person fridge, which puts it much closer to the latter.

But I wouldn't be surprised if Wolfgang Puck or Gordon Ramsay has a custom walk-in fridge that cost a lot more than US$10k.

A truly rich person has never seen their fridge.

Certainly, the truly rich person has never seen the main fridge their staff uses to store the ingredients for their meals.

But said rich person has at least one more fridge: a relatively-small, usually very elegant (in-wall, glass-door) fridge, located in the [badly designed for cooking, but pretty] "kitchen" that adjoins the butler's pantry [= nearest, usually secondary, real kitchen].

They use this "kitchen" to whimsically prepare avocado toast when hosting "guests" (e.g. people from Architectural Digest); or when vlogging / hosting their reality TV show about all the cooking they love doing. (At any other time, e.g. when hosting actual guests, if they want to make use of this kitchen [rather than simply speaking in their lounge until dinner is served in their separated dining room], it won't be by cooking there themselves, but rather by sitting around the kitchen island or the [probably open] secondary dining arrangement nearby, watching their private chef cook there, while they or their assistants try desperately to cover for how gimped their workflow is by having to use the faux-kitchen.)

And of course, even if the rich person does some whimsical/performative hobby cooking, the staff will have prepped and mise-en-placed anything they'll need from the butler's pantry onto the (huge) kitchen island in advance. (Like a cooking show!) So even then, they won't be needing the "kitchen" fridge. With the extreme edge-case exception of needing something to stay cool until the very moment it's needed; or needing to repeatedly chill it (think "making croissant dough", though I doubt a rich person would ever try.)

This reads like fiction rather than informed ethnography.

I think I've only been in one hectomillionaire's kitchen, though it can be hard to tell, and the only resemblance to your description is that he had a large household staff. But it wasn't his main house, and I don't know if you consider someone who isn't even a billionaire to be "truly rich".

Honestly, it's mostly just my impression of how things work after watching a lot of https://www.youtube.com/@ArvinHaddadOfficial 's mansion design reviews.

I'm guessing that most rich people do not want the inside of their mansions to appear on a YouTube channel, especially one about mansions. Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.

> I'm guessing that most rich people do not want the inside of their mansions to appear on a YouTube channel, especially one about mansions.

1. He doesn't film these walk-throughs himself. Real-estate agents film walk-throughs of these places to try to get them sold (it's well worth it for the commission they'll make), post them publically, and then he reviews those videos.

2. The homes in the walk-throughs are always vacant; there are no actual rich people involved to worry about their privacy. (They do almost look lived-in, yes, but that's all stuff that comes with the house. Not even staged; a lot of it is "design flourishes" added by the developer to match the architectural style.)

> Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.

When this guy records a review, it's to point out the flaws in a property's architecture + developer-furnished interior design. (Because that's the professional service he offers to his clients: inspecting properties for design flaws that lower the place's perceived resale value. His videos are a demonstration of that service.)

Thus, due to needing something worth spending 10 minutes talking about, the mansions he bothers to cover are always the ones that are badly designed.

My understanding is that these mansions exist in markets, and are built at scales, such that they actually should cost a lot more than they do. But their bad design has caused them to sit on the market for a long time; and that means the seller often gets desperate and lowers the price. (This isn't speculation; he often covers the market offer-price + resale-price history of a property as well.)

That being said, they still have all the features a truly-rich-person mansion should have. That stuff repeats over and over; you recognize it like MVC in software. These places are just the architectural equivalent of spaghetti code, putting things in inconvenient arrangements (I recall a recent review of a property where you had to walk down three hallways and cross two great rooms to get from the dining room to the nearest bathroom), stacking things so that rooms you'll spend a lot of time in don't have a great view (another property built into a hill made two bedrooms sub-grade with window wells, rather than just putting the bedrooms on the other side under the living room, where they'd get a panoramic picturesque view), and so on.

A lot of truly rich people live in houses that haven't been on the market for generations, or centuries, or ever. The particular hectomillionaire's vacation home I spent a few months in wasn't one of those (he's self-made) but also didn't have the kinds of features you're talking about at all. No separate hidden "main fridge", no butler's pantry, no second kitchen, no kitchen island, no great rooms, no panoramic picturesque views. It did have a dining room and bedrooms, though. It had been built as a small hotel, so it had five bedrooms (on the upper floor), an atrium, and a small swimming pool. From the street it just looked like a regular house. You could walk from the bedroom overlooking the swimming pool down the hall, down the stairs, down the other hall and dining room, across the patio, up the other stairs, and into the last bedroom, in about two minutes.

My in-laws live near but outside of a community that has been vacation homes for the 0.5% for over a century. Those homes never go "on the market". The owners will quietly put the word out and a year later someone new is spending a month of their summer there.

It used to be industrial powerhouse families. Today, it is more likely to be a hedge fund manager.

I've been in billionares vacation houses (like several of them in an area, not one billionares multiple houses).

They're pretty conventional.

Having been closely acquainted with a woman worth north of a billion dollars, and having met a number of people that are worth probably at least hundreds of millions, I can tell you the kitchen experience for the wealthy (maybe barring like top 10-100 billionaires) is really frankly kind of pedestrian. Are the kitchens nicer? Yeah sort of, I have fixed a bunch of stuff on a couple of certified real money mansions, and a lot of it is gimmicky stuff, some of it is good heavy expensive stuff, but honestly nothing that's doing some sort of extra magic a whole lot better than all of the plain old Whirlpool kit in my own home. Do they have help? Yeah for cleaning, and sometimes from what I've seen the one or two people helping around the house will help cook, but they're not dependent on it and it's more a "hey we're cooking for family, I need to delegate", as well as the sort of person I've met with that kind of money tends to skew much older anyways.

Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know, but the regular old very wealthy (the sort you don't know who they are, and I think they prefer it that way) live what you would probably consider mostly very pedestrian lives. More trips? Yes. Multiple homes in nice places? Yes. A couple of nice cars and a (reasonably sized) boat? Usually. Chartered flights? Absolutely. An army of staff and never doing even basic shit themselves? Nope and no on the doing basically nothing unless they're really geriatric (and then can you blame them anyways).

It sounds like you're describing idle-rich people. Which makes sense.

Yeah, if you're "rich" as in "retired", your life is usually pretty mundane. Most such people don't even live in any kind of mansion these days†, but rather just in very nice homes that are perfectly-sized and perfectly-cozy for them and what they like to do — with some verrrry long driveways, if they're in the right part of the country for that.

† (Mansions as a concept evolved from palaces; both exist mostly to provide enough rooms to host guests when some other rich person decides to pilgrimage themselves and everyone they know over to your place to stay for three months — in turn because that was really the only good way to visit someone with full amenities, back before air travel. Nobody needs to do that these days. Any modern mansion exists either as a status symbol, or because the owner likes hosting parties [or imagines they might one day host a party, but never actually does]. Mansions are especially useful, in the modern day, for people who throw fundraiser galas, like politicians.)

> Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know,

I don't think it's SV people doing this. (The SV entrepreneurial "grindset" is a form of protestant work-ethic mindset; most tech millionaires find it hard to allow themselves to have staff. They might have a lot of people on retainer — lawyers, personal trainers, private-practice doctors, etc — but they would find the idea of paying the full salary for the exclusive use of even a maid to be a bit strange, instead preferring to just "hire a service" for that. Right up until they have a security scare, that is... but I digress.)

Rather, the personal-staff (private chef, limo driver, landscaper, several maids, etc) setup is, these days, something for the busy rich — think "runs ten businesses because they don't know how to stop", or "has an infinite queue of people needing them to make a decision about something" [politician, chaebol owner], or "thrives on fame, and so can't stand to turn down packing their schedule with ever-bigger gigs" [celebrity actors]. You find it in LA and in DC, not in SF.

These groups "have people" because they literally wouldn't be able to fit self-care into their schedule without "people."

The fridge example is an interesting problem. A middle class person would probably be much better off just buying a used or cheap fridge. ~$100 - $1000. It will last as long as the $3500 - $5000 fridge and will cost a fraction as much. (and due to not being premium-aka-huge will be much easier to cart inside and outside of your house when it does break down.)

In _principle_ the truly rich person would be better off with a really expensive fridge. Except the chances that it performs better or lasts longer are tiny. So for 4x-10x the price, you have no improvement. The only way to improve your outcome is to spend enough time doing research such that you can figure out if _any_ refrigerators aren't pieces of crap. A for-real rich person has more money than time, so this isn't worth it either. Yes, they might settle on the first fridge that's available and looks nice -- and this _could_ be a premium fridge -- but they really don't get any benefit from a premium fridge either. ie, there's nothing to really push them from a $2k fridge to a $5k fridge unless it's just something like capacity.

In other words, poor-to-middle class should NEVER buy a premium fridge -- but only because the market is terrible and "premium" _usually_ does not mean "more reliable." (if premium meant "much more reliable" then they should buy premium when they can afford it, as it would cost less over time due to longevity.) However, a rich person also accrues almost no benefit from a premium fridge, as the real cost to them is research time and not money.

So, who are these products for? Probably middle class people who want to _appear_ rich.

Sometimes buying a longer-lived fridge for more money is still a bad bargain. If the short-lived fridge lives 20 years and the longer-lived one lives 100 years, the longer-lived one is a bad bargain if it costs twice as much, at any discount rate over about 3.34%. If it costs 4×, it's a bad bargain at any discount rate over 0.59%. At a 3% discount rate, the 4× fridge is a bad bargain even if you have to replace the short-lived fridge every 10 years.

However, probably the major cost of fridge failures is not replacement but the destruction of the fridge contents. A friend of mine recently lost their freezerful of food. Apparently after a power outage the freezer forgot whether it should be a freezer or a regular fridge and defaulted to "neither". This is an example of a "premium" feature making the freezer worse.

There's a midwit bell curve meme lurking here...

Not that dissimilar to Wirecutter's advice on appliances: either buy the cheapest of the cheap because it'll have the fewest parts that can break, or the most expensive since it'll be built with high quality components and hopefully be repairable.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances...

The cheapest appliance is definitely cheap, whereas you generally have to take on trust the quality of the most expensive. The rule of thumb I use is "you don't get what you don't pay for", which is not the same as "you get what you pay for".

The rich person goes to an exclusive London cobbler who spends 11 days carving out a model of his feet, one for left and one for right, out of expensive hardwood. Once complete, a team of masters and apprentices carefully craft him bespoke shoes out of premium leather (straight from Italy!). When finished, the shop calls his assistant and has them delivered. It only costs about $40,000.

You, the poor person, spend $150 on crappy Nike athletic footware, that isn't sized to fit, will fall apart in 6 months (3 if you're using them for actual athletics), but are unfashionable in 3 weeks (but you'll buy them for your middle school children anyway). And you'll think you're rich doing it. Never mind that the cost was $4.75 (up x2 what it was pre-Covid) in Bangladesh, plus $0.30 shipping across the Pacific. The sweatshop worker got a cut of $0.04 for the pair.

The analogy doesn't work though, because people nowdays are paradoxically even stupider than they were in Victorian times.

It's probably more like a rich person will spend $50 on a pair of boots that will last 10 years, while a poor person will spend $10 on a pair of boots that will last a year. The upper middle class person will spend the $40 on a pair of boots that comes with surveillance and useless AI, while a middle class person will spend $30 for the same, except it bricks itself on the next firmware update.

where, outside of thrift stores, are you finding boots at these prices?

That’s actually roughly the price range to manufacture normal shoes. “The average production cost of a single pair of shoes ranges between $10 and $50. This includes materials, labor, and overhead.” https://hevashoeinc.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-manufacture...

What you actually pay is a large multiple of that covering the taxes, shipping, sales channel, marketing, etc.

Boots and shoes are interesting because they're genuinely an area where premium materials and construction _could_ significantly improve how long they last. We're talking 1-2 years for "normal" boots and decades for $500+ boots (with re-soling) There's also a good middle ground here. I'm not saying everyone needs really expensive boots, but it nice that you can actually spend more money for higher quality rather than a horrible system on a chip that fails after a year and renders a whole product useless.

This is true of most products, actually.

My point was more along the lines of the fact that below a certain price point, you can't be sure whether you're paying $3500 for actual build quality and features or marketing. A $500 fridge could last forever, or it could last exactly as long as the (very short) warranty period. Also, cheap stuff may last forever in some ways, but it's been cost optimized in a million different ways that make it more annoying to use. In my case the compressor is fine, but the plastic interior has some inexplicable cracks in it and the feet broke off. But at least it will never advertise to me.