BoingBoing and Waxy are both linking to a Dallas Food article about Noka Chocolates. The general tenor of the internet commentary about Noka has been: “wtf, omg, they’re ripping people off!!”, which I think is incredibly interesting.
Malcolm Gladwell covered similar territory in his book Blink: people are ok with a company saying: “We’ll charge you a dollar more for this ice cream because it has 20% more chocolate chips in it.” However, they tend to feel like someone is trying to take them when it is: “We’ll charge you a dollar more because the ice-cream is in a round carton; not a rectangular one.”
I’ve even heard similar charges leveled against Starbucks and their “..burnt, overly strong, over priced fake Italian” coffee; that people only like it because it it is Starbucks and if the same brown liquid were sold in a filthy gas station then people would be less inclined to spend so much money on it.
It’s not rational, but I think that in matters of taste it’s less about rationality and more about emotion. It’s not “rational” that some people like pickles and some don’t. It’s not as if the salinity or caloric content or texture of a pickle changes from person to person. My grandfather managed to impart a lifelong dislike of dill pickles into my father through the simple expedient of feeding him vanilla ice cream as a baby, occasionally interspersed with dill pickles to make his face wrinkle.
Brand is the ultimate flavor enhancer.
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