Not only have I made more than my share of disastrous purchase decisions, I’m also inexplicably luckless: If there’s one defective sample or repack in an inventory, it will find me. I’m also a deceit magnet, and I’m spineless: More than once in my life, I have made abominable purchase decisions solely to please a manipulative salesman or a disinterested third party (read: girlfriend). There is abundant photographic evidence that I don’t know how to shop for clothes, my glasses are wrong for my face because I trust the advice of opticians with bad or no taste, and the less competent/more antagonistic the barber, the likelier I am to say “Great job, I love it” and tip them 50%. If I were smarter, I might actually be rich by now, or at least comfortable.
Thus, I regard my career in consumer journalism as one big cosmic joke. Everything about me fairly screams: Take my advice at your peril.
And yet: Owing in part to my history of mistakes, I have learned a few things about habituation: the art of forcing oneself to acquire an acquired taste. Like kimchi. Or Pimms No.1. (God protect us from Nos.2 through whatever.) Or Ives. Or bad-sounding audio components, the awfulness of which, we are assured, is the price to pay for their excellence in other regards, which usually turn out to be utterly unquantifiable. (Like verve.)
Are “good” products those that require the least amount of habituation? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Recently, Jim Austin and I had a long conversation about the various subjective criteria that separate the good from the bad, and before long we touched upon the notion that the very best products are those whose sonic appeal endures beyond good first impressions. That’s a definition that works for me.
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