Comment by derefr
1 month ago
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."
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.
What are the good brands of commercial/industrial we should be looking at?
2 replies →
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.