Comment by elzbardico
21 hours ago
> In some countries I had to make a conscious effort to try to wear clothes from acceptable brands and swap my functional laptop bag for something more stylish to avoid letting my purchasing habits become a point of judgment from others.
It is kind of fascinating, having come from such a culture, to realize that in the end, Americans, at least the average of the America I met, are not nearly brand conscious as I and everyone in my place supposed them to be.
Of course, America is a fucking giant and diverse place, and I think that even native born Americans have no fucking idea of how many different Americas exist, so, take my views of America with a giant grain of salt.
> It is kind of fascinating, having come from such a culture, to realize that in the end, Americans, at least the average of the America I met, are not nearly brand conscious as I and everyone in my place supposed them to be.
Speaking as an American with a formative decade overseas, I think some of that may come from the economics of international trade.
People think about a faraway place based on what gets transported and sold from there. If a country's most-visible exports are gourmet food, you'd start thinking that perhaps the average resident is a gourmand. In the case of the US, those "cultural exports" often involve branded goods, copyrighted media, food franchises, etc.
The brand that's 'Australian for beer' is very difficult to find in its domestic market!
That brand was in fact created for the American market, I recall. Australians also don't talk about "throwing another shrimp on the barbie". That's another Americanism. We call them prawns.
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Nit: a gourmand is the opposite of a gourmet
Nit of the nit: there are multiple usages and one of them is
> One who is fond of delicate fare; a judge of good eating. (Cf. gourmet n.)
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/gourmand_adj?tab=meaning_and_...
How so?
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> Of course, America is a fucking giant and diverse place, and I think that even native born Americans have no fucking idea of how many different Americas exist, so, take my views of America with a giant grain of salt.
I've been around a good amount of the US and yeah, being very judgey on brands just doesn't seem to be much of a thing. Maybe if I hung around rich people it'd be different, but I do know some rich people and they typically don't seem to give a shit either.
Well, other countries are diverse too. What Aurornis experiences is just a tiny fraction of other countries.
Not only are we not all brand conscious, some of us are so brand-blind that we buy clothes with large ads printed all over.
And yet, Thorsten Veblen was American. Have we mellowed out since his observations about "veblen goods"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
> Of course, America is a fucking giant and diverse place, and I think that even native born Americans have no fucking idea of how many different Americas exist, so, take my views of America with a giant grain of salt.
And yet somehow, with first 3/4 of this sentence, you've given a more accurate story about America than is almost ever provided!
I mean there's probably some correlation between arriving at this conclusion and the fact that most Americans establishing any sort of presence outside the US are probably influencers who are being bought to wear product. Hasan, for example, has a pretty decent user base outside the US, and literally wears nothing but designer clothing (which I always found comically ironic, given his political views).
I had a recent conversation with a colleague out of SE Asia and it was surprising to me how little access they have to a diversity of product. For example, I was describing my homelab which uses a lot of Minisforum hardware (mostly due to size constraints) and I found out that, despite literally being geographically closer, said product could not be purchased in their country. So I would imagine that leads to more homogenization than what might occur in the States. But that's just my ignorant conjecture.