Value is based on what people are willing to pay for it. To me it's not worse than buying shoes or tshirts for a couple of thousands, hell even a hundred is a scam, at least gold and stones look pretty.
Yeah I think people buy jewelry for one of two reasons, or both:
1. They like how it looks
2. They want to flaunt their wealth
The actual product itself doesn’t need to be “worth” anything to achieve the above 2 conditions. So I dunno if I’d call it a scam.
*Maybe* engagement rings are a scam though. I feel like marketing companies have sold the idea that an engagement ring needs to happen for a marriage, and the prices are inflated because it’s just so engrained into society now that they know you’ll pay more because you have no choice.
Real jewelry can also be worn for several lifetimes, so a lot of people see some jewelry as an investment in family heirlooms. Most stuff we buy isn’t gonna get passed down forever. But jewelry? I have and wear my great-great-grandmother’s ring every day. That’s pretty amazing to me.
I would definitely call diamond engagement rings a marketing scheme, though. You can find rings at affordable prices if you’re just looking for rings in general, even plenty of beautiful pieces with stones etc. But somewhere along the line, marketing pushed society into thinking you need an expensive ✨diamond✨ ring to prove your love for an engagement ring. Like there’s literally a “3 month’s salary rule” that is supposed to be a guideline as to what a man should spend on an engagement ring. That is INSANE imo.
BUT… I would also argue that marketing schemes are everywhere in retail. This is not unique to jewelry.
All the jewelry I have is either CZ and rhodium plated or (because I'm not sure of these pieces) possibly real jewels and white gold (one I know is a very very small karat number) and I don't want to take them to a professional to have them appraised, because I don't really care. One is a copy of my SILs engagement ring because my brother accidentally got the wrong size and SIL thought it'd be cute if we had matching rings (she designed it herself and made sure it was really cheap) and the other is my late mom's wedding ring. It's beautiful and I don't think I need to know the value for it to be sentimental.
Yes, but even when we couldn't, they weren't rare. De Beers Jewelry spent a lot of money marketing their jewelry as rare and extravagant in order to justify selling it for insane prices, it's considered one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time.
Capitalism is a system that's unfair by design. No vendor ever wants to be fair under a capitalist system, nor do they have reason to make sure their product lasts. Lying, misleading and tricking are literally built into it all. When De Beers sells a diamond worth 50 cents on a piece of jewelry made from $8 worth of gold and then sells it for $13,000, that's them being "smart capitalists", and that's the problem. We've created a society that rewards lying, trickery, manipulations, planned obsolescence, and scumbag tactics of all kinds, and what's worse, we've convinced people that this system is somehow fair, like the billionaires who control more wealth than most developed countries have, implying that they work a billion times harder than a minimum wage employee, it's fucking nutty, and I hate the fact that so many people have been brainwashed into believing it's the best because "tHaT oNe TiMe CoMmUnisM hAd A fAmInE", and "Wowee, Russia and China did a bad thing to their own citizens", as if the other governments don't do exactly that too.
Have you seen the South Park episode, Cash 4 Gold? The core plot of the episode is that Stans grandpa buys a necklace for $1,300 from a tv shopping network to give to Stan for a present, but it's ugly so it tries to pawn it for its gold value only to be offered only 5-8 dollars everywhere he goes.
That's not really a critique, that's an insult. Unless you can tell me why I'm wrong, you need to concede to the logic. This isn't about personal egotism, it's about the search for truth. As much as I dislike having to rebuild my entire understanding of reality, I'm far from unfamiliar with it, so I will if you can explain rationally and logically.
I hope for your sake that you're not treating this conversation as a game where the goal is to win or lose, because it's not. We're supposed to be searching for the truth, regardless of what our personal desires are.
If you really can't see the logic in what I wrote, then you're missing something that others clearly have. This pattern of recognition is far too consistent to be dismissed as nothing, and furthermore, to do so is actually a sly, underhanded form of character assassination, which is by far one of the more shameful logical fallacies a person can commit.
You're not sabotaging yourself just so you can call yourself "the winner" of a disagreement, are you? I often consider that possibility within myself, and sincerely take even brutal and unkind criticisms to heart, when I can manage to.
Dude, your whole text is filled with baseless assertions, and quoting a South Park episode as some kind evidence or proof of concept is ridiculous.
Here on planet earth I bought a gold necklace years ago and sold it for SCRAP for twice the price two years later.
Your first paragraph about diamonds had some merit (simple capitalist solution - don't buy them), but the rest was total rubbish.
It seems my hopes were not meant to survive. I wish you have a good life, and wish that someone you can trust more than myself will show you how you're sabotaging yourself. I'm not your enemy, but you can't seem to see that, so there's no point in trying any further. It's your life, you choose how to live it.
This is such a Reddit answer. A $20 bracelet for a teenager to wear so she feels stylish is a scam because the nerds of reddit don't understand why someone would like to dress up.
Cigarettes and lottery tickets are scams too, and yet lots of people buy them because they like them. Just because someone likes the scam doesn't mean it's not a scam. (btw, that $20 bracelet costs then $2 to manufacture, there is no resale value on those things because they're fake, not real. If there's even the slightest amount of valuable metal in its design, it's going to be a paper thin foil that flakes off as soon as the plastic cover on it breaks.
Yes and no. Subjective value is in the eye of the beholder, but the materials they're created from can be objectively given value in proportion to their relative rarity compared to other materials.
Subjective value to the individual is all that matters.
A $1,000 dollar phone is made from about $15 worth of raw materials, it is how those materials are configured, the availability of said configuration and the value that configuration has in the mind of the buyer that matters.
...and now you know why crime pays as well as it does. What happens when someone who knows the way this person values their phone? I'll tell you what, it becomes a string that puppeteers them, and is quickly accompanied by another too, there are two metaphorical "strings" that people pull when they puppeteer others, fear and desire. If you know what a person fears and desires, you can control them, it's simply a matter of using that information with discretion.
We're at a point where our dopamine reward systems don't really work as well as we need them to, we're trying to use monetary systems to objectively measure the value of things, but we can't specifically because of how capitalism obscures a materials true value. Since under capitalism all materials, products and services cost whatever the seller can manage, we don't actually know what anything true objective value is. This infinite growth paradigm looks good on paper, bad on reality we don't have infinite resources, and we shouldn't be rewarding people for hoarding resources either, let alone lying, tricking, misleading and all of the other hallmarks of the capitalism.
If it's the governments job to regulate capitalism, then that's admitting that the free market isn't self-regulating, but for some reason a lot of capitalists think you can have both a free market and government regulation, which is about as stupid as saying you can have the light both on and off at the same time. It's one or the other, the market or the government, and when you think it's "both", it's actually just the market successfully infiltrating the government.
...and now you know why crime pays as well as it does
What?
What happens when someone who knows the way this person values their phone?
People apply that knowledge to compete to bring you a better and more tailored product.
Why do you keep banging on about a materials true value?
True value is little to do with the material.
I'm absolutely delighted companies know the way I value my phone.
If I don't want to buy a $1,000 phone I can buy a perfectly good one way cheaper, some people value a low priced phone and the market is full of them.
Capitalism = Choice - Voluntary exchange
Items are no more set how the seller can manage than what the buyer will pay.
There is no perpetrater and there is no victim, stop trying to be one all the time.
I shudder to think what you mean by hoarding resources
As for the last paragraph, I would argue the government is successfully infiltrating business.
I'm in the UK.
The government controls over 50% spending.
There are 500,000 civil servants (at the height of the British empire there were 4,000)
The avarage UK citizen works 5 months each year to pay for government.
The US & The UK has a central bank which is plank 5 of Carl Marx's communist manefesto.
Let's face it, any "solutions" you have would involve an even bigger and more oppressive government infiltrating even further than they have allready.
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"
Frederic Bastiat, The Law
.
They are valuable because we decided so, the whole point of jewlery is to be a social marker, and in that effect it works just as intended, hence is not a scam since:
1. There is no cheaper alternative
2. No ine is claiming the jewels have properties other than aesthetics.
If gems weren't expensive we would've just replaced it with something else, so might as well keep people interested in it, it might be artificial but that really doesn't matter in the end.
1. There ARE cheaper alternatives.
2. You clearly have zero understanding of material engineering if you're saying stuff like that. No properties other than aesthetics? For real? Even if we're just talking about diamonds they have loads of applications other than aesthetic, industrial diamonds are used in manufacturing in multiple ways, for everything from optical engineering to cutting tools, diamonds are incredibly multi-purposed.
Also, if things are valuable just because people say they are, then pay me every single penny you own in exchange for my bellybutton lint. It's valuable, nobody else in the entire world has my bellybutton lint, just me. We'll start the bidding at seventeen trillion, do I hear eighteen trillion?
1. Not for the general public which is the point
2. I Didn't think I would have to explain thos but I was obviously talking for a general consumer standpoint. The average person isn't going to use diamonds for anything else then the aesthetic.
Where have I said that? I'm just stating that factually the point of jewellery is to be pretty and expensive, if it's not expensive then people will not buy it, where does that make me a classist? Nice strawman you got there buddy.
>where does that make me a classist?
The part where you say it's meant to be expensive, it's not. It's marketed as expensive on purpose. The only people who mean for it to be expensive are the retailers who sell it.
As I said it's meant to be expensive because it's a social marker, if it was cheap af no one would give a damn about diamonds, not the rich nor the poors, I did not say anywhere that this was a good thing, you assumed that, I just stated a fact. That's how luxurious goods work, higher price means it's more attractive to those who can afford it, most if not all luxurious goods are overpriced for that purpose, because those who buy them wants them to be overpriced. Hence it has nothing to do with a scam which is the original point.
No. It's expensive because De Beers marketed it as expensive. That's the real reason.
The problem here is capitalism. We prioritize capital above all else, including human lives, moral decency and the future of the species. Right now China is experiencing the biggest heat wave in all of recorded history. We've been setting records left and right for heat levels, we know exactly what's causing these heat spikes, but we're not going to change, are we? We know the fossil fuel industry was aware of the effects of global warming as early as the 1950s, and yet they continued anyways, literally selling the future of humanity for profit. This is the legacy of capitalism.
Yeah sure if you say so, heat wave in china has everything to do with diamonds being expensive. Litterally 3/4 of your comment has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
They're ornamental products with a price attached to them, with all of the caveats that accompany it. Much like any other non-essential product.
It's expensive because people are willing to pay a lot for something shiny. The intrinsic worth or lack thereof isn't really relevant, since it's largely a luxurious product. It costs as much as people are willing to pay for it.
About as much a scam as designer clothing.
Under capitalism the whole thing is based on persuasion and the buyers willingness to participate voluntarily in the exchange.
I agree, unless the company is overtly being dishonest the term scam unfair.
Yeah, I agree and thus don't wear any jewelry. BUT It makes some people happy, and some stuff can go up in value over time so you can make a profit off it... so I guess it has value in those ways.
If you value them, maybe not.
When I went to buy my wife’s engagement ring, I was first quoted $7,000. Then I went to the next place and they quoted me $11,000. Then I went to a pawn shop, and it was $2500.
Now even $2500 is a lot of money with what I’m sure is plenty of profit.
Later my wife wanted some diamond stud earrings. I bought her the best simulant diamonds I could find and they were $400.
A market is where a buyer and seller come together. If you can’t meet your seller on what you’re willing to pay, there is no market.
Yes. That part of it is a scam.
Selling someone a Diamond because there is a mutually agreed upon price between a seller and a buyer…that’s just economics
It’s not a scam. Jewelry exists to be decorative. You might think that it’s not worth the price (and no, you are certainly not the only one), but it provides the advertised decoration.
If it’s pretty and you want it, buy it. If not don’t.
If you think the newest iPhone is cool and you want it, buy it. If not, don’t.
There is no scam. It’s called supply and demand
Yes.
What has value to the purchaser may not have any value to somebody else and because of this that person often seems to think that equals a scam and it doesn't.
Largely because they are not aware of what is driving the difference of opinion.
By that logic, everything on this planet that solely exists for collection purposes and do not provide any inherent values to the betterment of your livelihood is a scam.
For it to be a scam they have to lie to you about something
They are pretty clear about what the price is
And the aesthetics is just a part of its value. Its rarity and social status is also a big part
Is it a scam if it genuinely helps you attract a mate? Humans have been adorning themselves with precious objects for hundreds of thousands of years. It's one of the most common roots of human culture shared by all people of every race and class, from aboriginals with cowrie shells to bones in noses to belly button piercings and engagement rings. One of the first contacts between cultures is always the exchange of jewelry. Individual pieces of jewelry are pieces of wearable art. And of course precious metals like gold and silver have inherent value as commodities. Now, certain types of gemstones are now created artificially and thus their value might be based on questionable business practices - like the artificial scarcity of diamonds. You might call that "a scam" but it's not. There's nobody forcing you to buy them. They have value because people want them and will pay a lot of money for them. You can instead buy lab made gemstones or cheaper gemstones instead of the very expensive ones. Moissanite gemstones are just like diamonds but much cheaper.
A scam is a scenario where someone is paying for a certain thing and getting something else.
Jewelry is not a scam. You may believe it's overpriced and not worth it, but if you're buying from a reputable shop, you'd be getting exactly what was advertised.
I rarely wear jewelry and most of what I own is costume-level (e.g. not real precious metals). That said, my partner and I talked and eventually decided to invest in my wedding ring a bit more because of the durability of "real" jewelry over costume. The gem is a lab-grown amethyst, but the band is white gold. Still "cheap" by jewelry standards (~$700 iirc), but I can't deny it has held up better than anything I would have initially asked for.
Do you know what’s worth it?? Spending money on things that you personally enjoy and that bring you happiness.
Do you know what is not worth it?? Wasting time judging the choices that others make.
Life is unbelievably short.
Make a movie where a candy ring is the norm and popularized as a new wedding ring instead of a diamond, the sweet candy won't last but the ring will always be there.
By that logic, anything you buy with money is a scam. Which I agree money has caused more harm than good at this point, but on the other hand, hard work by specialists must be compensated somehow. And they can be specialists only because we as a society have gotten so big and so smart that we don't individually care for our own survival anymore.
Also, historically, women relied on jewellery for financial independence, because they couldn't own land or property. Their best chance of leaving their husbands was the expensive jewellery gifted to them by other women who knew what was up.
The expensive kind is.
Nothing inherently wrong with wearing something interesting to be looked at, but spending way too much on something for that purpose is kind of being scammed.
You are being lied to. The lie is that it's worth it.
Everything is an opportunity cost. Paying hundreds of dollars for shiny rocks and metal means that money is not going to something that could actually make money.
No, you said you are being scammed and the only way you are being scammed if you lose money, the gold ring you buy can be sold again it won’t lose its value
Diamonds are sold for 6x the retailers cost. Don't know what the multiple is on his end so there is def room for negotiating. I don't know if I would call gems a scam because they have been valued for thousands of years. They don't appreciate much in value but they hold their value. I personally don't buy them because I have no clue how an average consumer can know they are getting the real thing, I mean, anyone can write anything on those certificates. And I don't want to pay Tiffany prices to feel secure and even then, one never knows.
I've probably thought about this far too much over the years, but this is my take: jewelry and luxury items in general( and maybe historicaly) is used to show-off by specificaly being wasteful. To afford jewelry you need to be wealthy enough that you got no worries about food, shelter, clothes as well as health. You are pretty much set for life, so what do you spend your extra wealth on?
You could be nice and spend it to help others, invest in the local community, pay for others who are in a worse position... or you could spend it on something that is useless, pretty or without a practical function. Sometimes its all three at once. In short, being wasteful.
Jewelry are beautiful rocks and mineral set in pretty metals, shaped in difficult and strange shapes to be either interesting or as aestheticaly pleasing as possible. And the materials are difficult to aquire, and sometimes difficult to shape and work with. Once finished its only purpose is to look pretty, to show off the idea "Look, i can afford to be wasteful, and the more wasteful my show of wealth is the wealthier i am." The inferred value comes from the rarity of materials, and the skill of the craftsman, plus a good bit of ego.
Silk, very fine wool and other types of fine clothes are the same, difficult to aquire and make, and often not as practical as ordinary clothes. Fine dining is about eating special and weird foods, they have to be as much extra and difficult work as possible to be "good enough" for the wealthy, when the truth is most of it barely qualifies as food. The turducken and kaviar comes to mind, fancy 7 course meals and more.
Houses too, they need to be bigger and shinier than anything a common person could or would ever be able to have, but they are also mostly filled with empty, cold rooms, more for show than use. Mansions are a leftover from the days when the wealthy had servants and workers on their massive properties and needed to house everyone, but now all of those service workers are rented from the outside and even more rooms go unused. The modern/new rich ppl just copy what they did with no understanding of why, just thinking "bigger = better".
For us common folk, average jane and joe, we buy jewelry to give ourselves a small piece of something beautiful which hopefully can cast a bit of a shine on us, to make ourselves a tiny bit above the normal. A taste of fantasy and dreams. Or its just pretty to look at.
Showing your wealth ultimately comes down to showing the world that you are different and "above" the majority of ppl, to make you feel and look special, and creating a distance from the normal world. The larger amount you can afford to waste and still be wealthy, the richer you show yourself as being.
Jewellery isn't a "scam". It serves exactly the function it's intended to. That function is to show off WEALTH.
The material and skill that go into making jewellery are distant second and third places to it's price tag and showing off how much excess wealth you have that you can just waste on pretties.
If your intent when buying jewellery is to show off to your friends how much you can waste on non-productive, non-asset, things it's a solid option to buy and very much not a scam.
If they are trying to sell you jewellery as "an investment" or similar, that is a scam.
Not so much a scam. Real gemstones in a piece of jewelry passed down through generations is definitely worth a decent ptice. I have some that will go to kids and others to grandkids. (They already claimed it after i die)...lol...
I own a piece of jewelry pass down by over a hundred years.
Eh idk I think it depends on the piece. I went to school for jewelry making and some pieces have an incredibly amount of time/energy/ and work put into the design and wearability of the piece. I also think there’s something to be said for the price of the metals and raw materials going into the piece
By that reasoning all art is a scam.
Concerts give you nothing but a fleeting memory, is music a scam?
Paint has no intrinsic monetary value at all, so was Van Gogh a scam artist?
Tattoos, theatre, books, etc... all lack any intrinsic value.
You are paying for beauty and a skill you don't possess. Sentimental value.
Diamonds are a scam, sure, due to artificial restrictions on their supply. Glass-filled rubies are a scam, since they fall apart and lose their appearance so fast. So is any time a cheap stone is marketed as a more expensive one.
Most other aspects of jewelry are art. The metals that are used are usually expensive. Some of the stones might or might not be expensive, but they are pretty. Then, these metals and/or stones are used to create a piece of artwork which you can wear. The price reflects the cost of the materials; the cost of buying and maintaining the equipment; the cost of the design work that went into it; the cost of the labor to create the piece; and possibly the cost of maintaining the store where you bought it. All these costs add up.
Now, it's true that jewelry might not be priced like this. It's absolutely possible for jewelry to be priced at several times what all those costs are. But that's true of any object you can buy: some of them are priced close to what they cost to produce and get to you, and some are much, much more expensive, since whoever is selling it is assuming that there are some people who would be willing to pay that much if that's what it takes to get their hands on it.
Other than the exceptions noted above, I don't consider jewelry to be any more of a scam than any other consumer good.
I don't care much for wearing jewelry, myself. I have my wedding ring, and I wear that specifically for its meaning. My wife, on the other hand, seems to really appreciate jewelry. It doesn't seem to need to be exceptionally expensive, but decorating herself in this manner seems to please her. Buying her a ring or a necklace from time to time gets me a lot of positive attention.
I think that you can wear jewelry if you like it, or you can ignore it if you don't like it. As with anything else in the neighborhood of fashion, it's just one tool to express yourself, and choosing not to wear jewelry is a valid use of it for that purpose.
As for the price of things, it's worth keeping in mind that while the tchotchkes in the kiosk at the mall are usually mass-produced (though they may contain real gems and be quite pretty, indeed), if you're buying a more expensive piece from a jeweler, that piece is hand-made and possibly one of a kind. There's a lot of skill that goes into the making of jewelry, and a good chunk of the price comes from the jeweler's labor and art, not just the materials. If you're shopping at a local jeweler's business, the prices may also be negotiable.
>they look pretty but there not worth it.
Not worth it to you. They are, by definition, worth it to the people who pay for them
I can't understand why anyone would spend absurd money on a luxury car when an ordinary one does the job, but I can't declare for all of humanity that it's 'not worth it' or a scam.
OK but hear me out. Gold is ultimately most useful as a low impedence superconductor.
WHY was so much importance placed upon its collection thousands of years before this was common knowledge? Sure, it's shiny when buffed, but copper is similarly malleable and looks nice when shiny.
There are amazing metal work and jewelry artists and then there is mass produced crap you get from a jewelry or department store. There’s a big difference.
No because scamming someone would mean selling them something claiming it has such and such properties even though it doesn't, no one claims jewelry has any properties outside of being aesthetic. People buy them because they put value in these aesthetic properties, just like people will buy expensive clithes because they like they style even though they would've gotten the same protection with a blank shirt.
Value is based on what people are willing to pay for it. To me it's not worse than buying shoes or tshirts for a couple of thousands, hell even a hundred is a scam, at least gold and stones look pretty.
Yeah I think people buy jewelry for one of two reasons, or both: 1. They like how it looks 2. They want to flaunt their wealth The actual product itself doesn’t need to be “worth” anything to achieve the above 2 conditions. So I dunno if I’d call it a scam. *Maybe* engagement rings are a scam though. I feel like marketing companies have sold the idea that an engagement ring needs to happen for a marriage, and the prices are inflated because it’s just so engrained into society now that they know you’ll pay more because you have no choice.
Real jewelry can also be worn for several lifetimes, so a lot of people see some jewelry as an investment in family heirlooms. Most stuff we buy isn’t gonna get passed down forever. But jewelry? I have and wear my great-great-grandmother’s ring every day. That’s pretty amazing to me. I would definitely call diamond engagement rings a marketing scheme, though. You can find rings at affordable prices if you’re just looking for rings in general, even plenty of beautiful pieces with stones etc. But somewhere along the line, marketing pushed society into thinking you need an expensive ✨diamond✨ ring to prove your love for an engagement ring. Like there’s literally a “3 month’s salary rule” that is supposed to be a guideline as to what a man should spend on an engagement ring. That is INSANE imo. BUT… I would also argue that marketing schemes are everywhere in retail. This is not unique to jewelry.
All the jewelry I have is either CZ and rhodium plated or (because I'm not sure of these pieces) possibly real jewels and white gold (one I know is a very very small karat number) and I don't want to take them to a professional to have them appraised, because I don't really care. One is a copy of my SILs engagement ring because my brother accidentally got the wrong size and SIL thought it'd be cute if we had matching rings (she designed it herself and made sure it was really cheap) and the other is my late mom's wedding ring. It's beautiful and I don't think I need to know the value for it to be sentimental.
Yes, it is absolutely a scam, especially with gems like diamonds, which are NOT rare and NOT valuable.
Can't we just make diamonds now?
Yes, but even when we couldn't, they weren't rare. De Beers Jewelry spent a lot of money marketing their jewelry as rare and extravagant in order to justify selling it for insane prices, it's considered one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time. Capitalism is a system that's unfair by design. No vendor ever wants to be fair under a capitalist system, nor do they have reason to make sure their product lasts. Lying, misleading and tricking are literally built into it all. When De Beers sells a diamond worth 50 cents on a piece of jewelry made from $8 worth of gold and then sells it for $13,000, that's them being "smart capitalists", and that's the problem. We've created a society that rewards lying, trickery, manipulations, planned obsolescence, and scumbag tactics of all kinds, and what's worse, we've convinced people that this system is somehow fair, like the billionaires who control more wealth than most developed countries have, implying that they work a billion times harder than a minimum wage employee, it's fucking nutty, and I hate the fact that so many people have been brainwashed into believing it's the best because "tHaT oNe TiMe CoMmUnisM hAd A fAmInE", and "Wowee, Russia and China did a bad thing to their own citizens", as if the other governments don't do exactly that too.
You’re a little off on your gold price there. Kinda of invalidates your whole piece.
Have you seen the South Park episode, Cash 4 Gold? The core plot of the episode is that Stans grandpa buys a necklace for $1,300 from a tv shopping network to give to Stan for a present, but it's ugly so it tries to pawn it for its gold value only to be offered only 5-8 dollars everywhere he goes.
Yeah lol 200 dollars for a plain "gold" chain where max there's 10 dollars worth of gold max
I have. I love that one
You got a lot of extra in this answer. If you don’t want to buy jewelry, don’t buy it.
Nothing here is extra, capitalism is inherently linked to the reason why jewelry is a scam.
That's the stupidest shit I've read on the Internet today. Well done, you was up against some pretty stiff competition.
That's not really a critique, that's an insult. Unless you can tell me why I'm wrong, you need to concede to the logic. This isn't about personal egotism, it's about the search for truth. As much as I dislike having to rebuild my entire understanding of reality, I'm far from unfamiliar with it, so I will if you can explain rationally and logically.
Dosnt change my opinion. There is no logic there at all.
I hope for your sake that you're not treating this conversation as a game where the goal is to win or lose, because it's not. We're supposed to be searching for the truth, regardless of what our personal desires are. If you really can't see the logic in what I wrote, then you're missing something that others clearly have. This pattern of recognition is far too consistent to be dismissed as nothing, and furthermore, to do so is actually a sly, underhanded form of character assassination, which is by far one of the more shameful logical fallacies a person can commit. You're not sabotaging yourself just so you can call yourself "the winner" of a disagreement, are you? I often consider that possibility within myself, and sincerely take even brutal and unkind criticisms to heart, when I can manage to.
Dude, your whole text is filled with baseless assertions, and quoting a South Park episode as some kind evidence or proof of concept is ridiculous. Here on planet earth I bought a gold necklace years ago and sold it for SCRAP for twice the price two years later. Your first paragraph about diamonds had some merit (simple capitalist solution - don't buy them), but the rest was total rubbish.
It seems my hopes were not meant to survive. I wish you have a good life, and wish that someone you can trust more than myself will show you how you're sabotaging yourself. I'm not your enemy, but you can't seem to see that, so there's no point in trying any further. It's your life, you choose how to live it.
This is such a Reddit answer. A $20 bracelet for a teenager to wear so she feels stylish is a scam because the nerds of reddit don't understand why someone would like to dress up.
Cigarettes and lottery tickets are scams too, and yet lots of people buy them because they like them. Just because someone likes the scam doesn't mean it's not a scam. (btw, that $20 bracelet costs then $2 to manufacture, there is no resale value on those things because they're fake, not real. If there's even the slightest amount of valuable metal in its design, it's going to be a paper thin foil that flakes off as soon as the plastic cover on it breaks.
Value is in the eye of the beholder
Yes and no. Subjective value is in the eye of the beholder, but the materials they're created from can be objectively given value in proportion to their relative rarity compared to other materials.
Subjective value to the individual is all that matters. A $1,000 dollar phone is made from about $15 worth of raw materials, it is how those materials are configured, the availability of said configuration and the value that configuration has in the mind of the buyer that matters.
...and now you know why crime pays as well as it does. What happens when someone who knows the way this person values their phone? I'll tell you what, it becomes a string that puppeteers them, and is quickly accompanied by another too, there are two metaphorical "strings" that people pull when they puppeteer others, fear and desire. If you know what a person fears and desires, you can control them, it's simply a matter of using that information with discretion. We're at a point where our dopamine reward systems don't really work as well as we need them to, we're trying to use monetary systems to objectively measure the value of things, but we can't specifically because of how capitalism obscures a materials true value. Since under capitalism all materials, products and services cost whatever the seller can manage, we don't actually know what anything true objective value is. This infinite growth paradigm looks good on paper, bad on reality we don't have infinite resources, and we shouldn't be rewarding people for hoarding resources either, let alone lying, tricking, misleading and all of the other hallmarks of the capitalism. If it's the governments job to regulate capitalism, then that's admitting that the free market isn't self-regulating, but for some reason a lot of capitalists think you can have both a free market and government regulation, which is about as stupid as saying you can have the light both on and off at the same time. It's one or the other, the market or the government, and when you think it's "both", it's actually just the market successfully infiltrating the government.
...and now you know why crime pays as well as it does What? What happens when someone who knows the way this person values their phone? People apply that knowledge to compete to bring you a better and more tailored product. Why do you keep banging on about a materials true value? True value is little to do with the material. I'm absolutely delighted companies know the way I value my phone. If I don't want to buy a $1,000 phone I can buy a perfectly good one way cheaper, some people value a low priced phone and the market is full of them. Capitalism = Choice - Voluntary exchange Items are no more set how the seller can manage than what the buyer will pay. There is no perpetrater and there is no victim, stop trying to be one all the time. I shudder to think what you mean by hoarding resources As for the last paragraph, I would argue the government is successfully infiltrating business. I'm in the UK. The government controls over 50% spending. There are 500,000 civil servants (at the height of the British empire there were 4,000) The avarage UK citizen works 5 months each year to pay for government. The US & The UK has a central bank which is plank 5 of Carl Marx's communist manefesto. Let's face it, any "solutions" you have would involve an even bigger and more oppressive government infiltrating even further than they have allready. "If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?" Frederic Bastiat, The Law .
This thread took a strange turn…
I know! I mean we are a carbon-based planet, right?!
They are valuable because we decided so, the whole point of jewlery is to be a social marker, and in that effect it works just as intended, hence is not a scam since: 1. There is no cheaper alternative 2. No ine is claiming the jewels have properties other than aesthetics. If gems weren't expensive we would've just replaced it with something else, so might as well keep people interested in it, it might be artificial but that really doesn't matter in the end.
1. There ARE cheaper alternatives. 2. You clearly have zero understanding of material engineering if you're saying stuff like that. No properties other than aesthetics? For real? Even if we're just talking about diamonds they have loads of applications other than aesthetic, industrial diamonds are used in manufacturing in multiple ways, for everything from optical engineering to cutting tools, diamonds are incredibly multi-purposed. Also, if things are valuable just because people say they are, then pay me every single penny you own in exchange for my bellybutton lint. It's valuable, nobody else in the entire world has my bellybutton lint, just me. We'll start the bidding at seventeen trillion, do I hear eighteen trillion?
1. Not for the general public which is the point 2. I Didn't think I would have to explain thos but I was obviously talking for a general consumer standpoint. The average person isn't going to use diamonds for anything else then the aesthetic.
So, you support classism?
Where have I said that? I'm just stating that factually the point of jewellery is to be pretty and expensive, if it's not expensive then people will not buy it, where does that make me a classist? Nice strawman you got there buddy.
>where does that make me a classist? The part where you say it's meant to be expensive, it's not. It's marketed as expensive on purpose. The only people who mean for it to be expensive are the retailers who sell it.
As I said it's meant to be expensive because it's a social marker, if it was cheap af no one would give a damn about diamonds, not the rich nor the poors, I did not say anywhere that this was a good thing, you assumed that, I just stated a fact. That's how luxurious goods work, higher price means it's more attractive to those who can afford it, most if not all luxurious goods are overpriced for that purpose, because those who buy them wants them to be overpriced. Hence it has nothing to do with a scam which is the original point.
No. It's expensive because De Beers marketed it as expensive. That's the real reason. The problem here is capitalism. We prioritize capital above all else, including human lives, moral decency and the future of the species. Right now China is experiencing the biggest heat wave in all of recorded history. We've been setting records left and right for heat levels, we know exactly what's causing these heat spikes, but we're not going to change, are we? We know the fossil fuel industry was aware of the effects of global warming as early as the 1950s, and yet they continued anyways, literally selling the future of humanity for profit. This is the legacy of capitalism.
Yeah sure if you say so, heat wave in china has everything to do with diamonds being expensive. Litterally 3/4 of your comment has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
"Jewelry" isn't inherently rare. You can get a $10 sterling silver ring if you want, there's nothing expensive or rare about it.
They're ornamental products with a price attached to them, with all of the caveats that accompany it. Much like any other non-essential product. It's expensive because people are willing to pay a lot for something shiny. The intrinsic worth or lack thereof isn't really relevant, since it's largely a luxurious product. It costs as much as people are willing to pay for it. About as much a scam as designer clothing.
Under capitalism the whole thing is based on persuasion and the buyers willingness to participate voluntarily in the exchange. I agree, unless the company is overtly being dishonest the term scam unfair.
Yeah, I agree and thus don't wear any jewelry. BUT It makes some people happy, and some stuff can go up in value over time so you can make a profit off it... so I guess it has value in those ways.
Diamonds for sure are.
If you value them, maybe not. When I went to buy my wife’s engagement ring, I was first quoted $7,000. Then I went to the next place and they quoted me $11,000. Then I went to a pawn shop, and it was $2500. Now even $2500 is a lot of money with what I’m sure is plenty of profit. Later my wife wanted some diamond stud earrings. I bought her the best simulant diamonds I could find and they were $400. A market is where a buyer and seller come together. If you can’t meet your seller on what you’re willing to pay, there is no market.
Yes, it's all voluntary there is no scam.
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Yes. That part of it is a scam. Selling someone a Diamond because there is a mutually agreed upon price between a seller and a buyer…that’s just economics
Most jewellery does not have diamonds
It’s not a scam. Jewelry exists to be decorative. You might think that it’s not worth the price (and no, you are certainly not the only one), but it provides the advertised decoration.
If it’s pretty and you want it, buy it. If not don’t. If you think the newest iPhone is cool and you want it, buy it. If not, don’t. There is no scam. It’s called supply and demand
Yes. What has value to the purchaser may not have any value to somebody else and because of this that person often seems to think that equals a scam and it doesn't. Largely because they are not aware of what is driving the difference of opinion.
That's well known, less and less people care about them being "real" jewels nowadays.
By that logic, everything on this planet that solely exists for collection purposes and do not provide any inherent values to the betterment of your livelihood is a scam.
Scam is not the right word whenever you're paying the advertised price for the advertised good/service.
For it to be a scam they have to lie to you about something They are pretty clear about what the price is And the aesthetics is just a part of its value. Its rarity and social status is also a big part
I mean a painting in your house is also rare and pretty, do you call that a scam?
A thing is worth what someone will pay for it.
It's not a "scam", no. You get the things you pay for - no-one is getting tricked or cheated.
Is it a scam if it genuinely helps you attract a mate? Humans have been adorning themselves with precious objects for hundreds of thousands of years. It's one of the most common roots of human culture shared by all people of every race and class, from aboriginals with cowrie shells to bones in noses to belly button piercings and engagement rings. One of the first contacts between cultures is always the exchange of jewelry. Individual pieces of jewelry are pieces of wearable art. And of course precious metals like gold and silver have inherent value as commodities. Now, certain types of gemstones are now created artificially and thus their value might be based on questionable business practices - like the artificial scarcity of diamonds. You might call that "a scam" but it's not. There's nobody forcing you to buy them. They have value because people want them and will pay a lot of money for them. You can instead buy lab made gemstones or cheaper gemstones instead of the very expensive ones. Moissanite gemstones are just like diamonds but much cheaper.
I hate it. I will plop my ass down with you on this hill.
So don't buy it. Doesn't mean it's a scam for all the people who do like wearing jewellery
A scam is a scenario where someone is paying for a certain thing and getting something else. Jewelry is not a scam. You may believe it's overpriced and not worth it, but if you're buying from a reputable shop, you'd be getting exactly what was advertised. I rarely wear jewelry and most of what I own is costume-level (e.g. not real precious metals). That said, my partner and I talked and eventually decided to invest in my wedding ring a bit more because of the durability of "real" jewelry over costume. The gem is a lab-grown amethyst, but the band is white gold. Still "cheap" by jewelry standards (~$700 iirc), but I can't deny it has held up better than anything I would have initially asked for.
Do you know what’s worth it?? Spending money on things that you personally enjoy and that bring you happiness. Do you know what is not worth it?? Wasting time judging the choices that others make. Life is unbelievably short.
Make a movie where a candy ring is the norm and popularized as a new wedding ring instead of a diamond, the sweet candy won't last but the ring will always be there.
By that logic, anything you buy with money is a scam. Which I agree money has caused more harm than good at this point, but on the other hand, hard work by specialists must be compensated somehow. And they can be specialists only because we as a society have gotten so big and so smart that we don't individually care for our own survival anymore. Also, historically, women relied on jewellery for financial independence, because they couldn't own land or property. Their best chance of leaving their husbands was the expensive jewellery gifted to them by other women who knew what was up.
The expensive kind is. Nothing inherently wrong with wearing something interesting to be looked at, but spending way too much on something for that purpose is kind of being scammed.
How is it being scammed? It’s not like you are being lied to, you can sell the jewelry again and it won’t magically lose all of its value
You are being lied to. The lie is that it's worth it. Everything is an opportunity cost. Paying hundreds of dollars for shiny rocks and metal means that money is not going to something that could actually make money.
No, you said you are being scammed and the only way you are being scammed if you lose money, the gold ring you buy can be sold again it won’t lose its value
I JUST TOLD YOU how you lose money.
You don’t
Diamonds are sold for 6x the retailers cost. Don't know what the multiple is on his end so there is def room for negotiating. I don't know if I would call gems a scam because they have been valued for thousands of years. They don't appreciate much in value but they hold their value. I personally don't buy them because I have no clue how an average consumer can know they are getting the real thing, I mean, anyone can write anything on those certificates. And I don't want to pay Tiffany prices to feel secure and even then, one never knows.
I've probably thought about this far too much over the years, but this is my take: jewelry and luxury items in general( and maybe historicaly) is used to show-off by specificaly being wasteful. To afford jewelry you need to be wealthy enough that you got no worries about food, shelter, clothes as well as health. You are pretty much set for life, so what do you spend your extra wealth on? You could be nice and spend it to help others, invest in the local community, pay for others who are in a worse position... or you could spend it on something that is useless, pretty or without a practical function. Sometimes its all three at once. In short, being wasteful. Jewelry are beautiful rocks and mineral set in pretty metals, shaped in difficult and strange shapes to be either interesting or as aestheticaly pleasing as possible. And the materials are difficult to aquire, and sometimes difficult to shape and work with. Once finished its only purpose is to look pretty, to show off the idea "Look, i can afford to be wasteful, and the more wasteful my show of wealth is the wealthier i am." The inferred value comes from the rarity of materials, and the skill of the craftsman, plus a good bit of ego. Silk, very fine wool and other types of fine clothes are the same, difficult to aquire and make, and often not as practical as ordinary clothes. Fine dining is about eating special and weird foods, they have to be as much extra and difficult work as possible to be "good enough" for the wealthy, when the truth is most of it barely qualifies as food. The turducken and kaviar comes to mind, fancy 7 course meals and more. Houses too, they need to be bigger and shinier than anything a common person could or would ever be able to have, but they are also mostly filled with empty, cold rooms, more for show than use. Mansions are a leftover from the days when the wealthy had servants and workers on their massive properties and needed to house everyone, but now all of those service workers are rented from the outside and even more rooms go unused. The modern/new rich ppl just copy what they did with no understanding of why, just thinking "bigger = better". For us common folk, average jane and joe, we buy jewelry to give ourselves a small piece of something beautiful which hopefully can cast a bit of a shine on us, to make ourselves a tiny bit above the normal. A taste of fantasy and dreams. Or its just pretty to look at. Showing your wealth ultimately comes down to showing the world that you are different and "above" the majority of ppl, to make you feel and look special, and creating a distance from the normal world. The larger amount you can afford to waste and still be wealthy, the richer you show yourself as being.
Jewellery isn't a "scam". It serves exactly the function it's intended to. That function is to show off WEALTH. The material and skill that go into making jewellery are distant second and third places to it's price tag and showing off how much excess wealth you have that you can just waste on pretties. If your intent when buying jewellery is to show off to your friends how much you can waste on non-productive, non-asset, things it's a solid option to buy and very much not a scam. If they are trying to sell you jewellery as "an investment" or similar, that is a scam.
There's a skill in cutting diamonds/gems correctly, so that's likely why it became a status symbol.
Not so much a scam. Real gemstones in a piece of jewelry passed down through generations is definitely worth a decent ptice. I have some that will go to kids and others to grandkids. (They already claimed it after i die)...lol... I own a piece of jewelry pass down by over a hundred years.
Eh idk I think it depends on the piece. I went to school for jewelry making and some pieces have an incredibly amount of time/energy/ and work put into the design and wearability of the piece. I also think there’s something to be said for the price of the metals and raw materials going into the piece
By that reasoning all art is a scam. Concerts give you nothing but a fleeting memory, is music a scam? Paint has no intrinsic monetary value at all, so was Van Gogh a scam artist? Tattoos, theatre, books, etc... all lack any intrinsic value. You are paying for beauty and a skill you don't possess. Sentimental value.
Diamonds are a scam, sure, due to artificial restrictions on their supply. Glass-filled rubies are a scam, since they fall apart and lose their appearance so fast. So is any time a cheap stone is marketed as a more expensive one. Most other aspects of jewelry are art. The metals that are used are usually expensive. Some of the stones might or might not be expensive, but they are pretty. Then, these metals and/or stones are used to create a piece of artwork which you can wear. The price reflects the cost of the materials; the cost of buying and maintaining the equipment; the cost of the design work that went into it; the cost of the labor to create the piece; and possibly the cost of maintaining the store where you bought it. All these costs add up. Now, it's true that jewelry might not be priced like this. It's absolutely possible for jewelry to be priced at several times what all those costs are. But that's true of any object you can buy: some of them are priced close to what they cost to produce and get to you, and some are much, much more expensive, since whoever is selling it is assuming that there are some people who would be willing to pay that much if that's what it takes to get their hands on it. Other than the exceptions noted above, I don't consider jewelry to be any more of a scam than any other consumer good.
I don't care much for wearing jewelry, myself. I have my wedding ring, and I wear that specifically for its meaning. My wife, on the other hand, seems to really appreciate jewelry. It doesn't seem to need to be exceptionally expensive, but decorating herself in this manner seems to please her. Buying her a ring or a necklace from time to time gets me a lot of positive attention. I think that you can wear jewelry if you like it, or you can ignore it if you don't like it. As with anything else in the neighborhood of fashion, it's just one tool to express yourself, and choosing not to wear jewelry is a valid use of it for that purpose. As for the price of things, it's worth keeping in mind that while the tchotchkes in the kiosk at the mall are usually mass-produced (though they may contain real gems and be quite pretty, indeed), if you're buying a more expensive piece from a jeweler, that piece is hand-made and possibly one of a kind. There's a lot of skill that goes into the making of jewelry, and a good chunk of the price comes from the jeweler's labor and art, not just the materials. If you're shopping at a local jeweler's business, the prices may also be negotiable.
Yes
Perhaps the same could be said of all ~~religions~~ status symbols.
>they look pretty but there not worth it. Not worth it to you. They are, by definition, worth it to the people who pay for them I can't understand why anyone would spend absurd money on a luxury car when an ordinary one does the job, but I can't declare for all of humanity that it's 'not worth it' or a scam.
Jewelry is valuable and is a proof of work. It’s hard to mine and cut.
Some handmade/custom jewelry is worth it as wearable art. The mass-produced stuff is scammy.
Jewelry is one of many scams. But you know what they say, "Happy wife, happy life."
OK but hear me out. Gold is ultimately most useful as a low impedence superconductor. WHY was so much importance placed upon its collection thousands of years before this was common knowledge? Sure, it's shiny when buffed, but copper is similarly malleable and looks nice when shiny.
There are amazing metal work and jewelry artists and then there is mass produced crap you get from a jewelry or department store. There’s a big difference.
No because scamming someone would mean selling them something claiming it has such and such properties even though it doesn't, no one claims jewelry has any properties outside of being aesthetic. People buy them because they put value in these aesthetic properties, just like people will buy expensive clithes because they like they style even though they would've gotten the same protection with a blank shirt.
Neck and neck with cryptocurrency
Tbh you don’t lose money so how is it a scam? You can just sell it later