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.
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.)
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.
$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.)
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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.