I was eating some chocolate when I imagined a world where Hershey’s was widely accepted, even by elitists, as the best chocolate.
Is consumer elitism just a facade for pretentious contrarians? Or are there things where even most snobs agree with the masses?
Also, I mean that the product is intrinsically considered to be the best option. I’m not considering social products where the user network makes the experience.
Edit: I was not eating Hershey’s. Hershey’s being the best chocolate is a bizarro universe in this hypothetical.
Hershey in a sentence with “chocolate” without a negation? This is weird.
When someone offered me a piece of Hersheys “chocolate” ages ago I spit it out and asked if this is perhaps spoiled. No, it wasn’t spoiled, this stuff actually tastes vile. I don’t know how Americans can stand this stuff…
In terms of why some of the “goto” brands aren’t the best, it’s generally because they were the best, got popular on merit, and then business folk come along to suck the life out of it, spending brand goodwill while gouging customers and cutting costs.
Some food product recipe changes to cheap, more shelf stable crap for mass production and easy logistics. Some device gets locked into a paid subscription. All the helpful service people get fired and replaced with chat bots and offshored/outsourced staff. Metal components replaced with cheap plastic that degrades. Shipping times increased so they can make everything an ocean away and give the boat time to travel. Also run big marketing pushes so it’s really hard to find the quality offerings.
There’s just so many ways you can have big margins on big revenue by screwing customers while going they haven’t noticed the decline in quality. Very hard for investor class to leave good product alone.
Amazon’s delivery time is insane. I use other services like eBay for the most part, but when I need something fast idk who else to use besides Amazon.
Lego is the best of the blocks/bricks. Nothing else is close in quality.
I’d say musical instruments.
Even an entry-level Fender Squier guitar is going to be more solid, easier to set up and keep in tune, and have better tone than an off brand instrument. Yamaha also makes beginner/student models for a large variety of instruments, all of which are designed to last for years.
I’m hard-pressed to think of any small brand that makes anything widely preferred over the recognizable ones.
I would disagree with this quite strongly. Most brands have several different tiers of products. Often, especially for the budget-level options like Squiers, the manufacturing is outsourced. For example, my first electric guitar was from Cort, a South Korean company whose main business at the time was doing contract manufacturing for Ibanez, Squier, PRS, and G&L, Kramer, Honer, and more. Literally the same wood and parts, just with slightly different shapes and branding.
The highest-end, elitist guitars would be small shops that focus on handmade custom work. Stuff like Dunable or what PRS used to be. Jackson is now owned by Fender, but it used to be a more premium brand. Custom shop stuff is always going to be premium regardless of brand- Schecter, Ibanez, Dean, Gibson, Fender, doesn’t matter.
To compare this to OP’s prompt, it would be like if Hershey did custom high-quality chocolate options, also sold good quality chocolate, and also sold a decent value option in grocery stores, and also sold the plastic brown goop they sell today as a budget option.
Definitely.
Cpu architecture. X86 is just a lot easier to deal with compared to risc-v arm, or Apple.
I’m hopeful it will change though, and I’m rooting for risc-v.
If we’re referring to battery life x86 doesn’t win very often sadly. There’s a reason most handheld devices on earth use ARM.
Well, originally it was largely because no x86 implementation implemented decent deep idle behavior. Even as there might be some x86 implementations now that could credibly serve handheld market, the ecosystem is built around ARM so no one has a reason to deviate from that recipe.
Hershey’s chocolate has a vomit aftertaste. Lindt chocolate is so much better.
Does Hershey’s have a regional taste shift like coke does, based on where it was made? Atlanta coke vs Toronto coke is night and day. Hershey used to be made from Canadian milk shipped down in trucks.
Hershey has always had a sort of vomit aftertaste. The presence of butyric acid is the culprit. This compound is created when milk undergoes a process called lipolysis, which breaks down fatty acids to extend the chocolate’s shelf life. Butyric acid is also found in human vomit, Parmesan cheese, and rancid butter. This is a direct result of Hershey engineering the chocolate to have a long shelf life. During the early 20th century, when refrigeration wasn’t reliable, the chocolate brand Hershey’s adopted a milk-stabilization process involving controlled lipolysis. The method kept milk usable for large-scale chocolate production as it traveled across country, but it also created butyric acid as a by-product. Butyric acid is perfectly safe to consume.
I always wondered if part of the problem is the long shelf life. I swear I’ve tasted some hersheys that was good. Perhaps it ages safely but rancid?
The aftertaste is very subtle, one might describe it as tangy. If you are an American and have never had foreign chocolate, you’ve probably only ever had chocolate with with milk that has undergone lipolysis; and you’d likely never notice it. For the first 5 years of my life I was raised in foster care by naturalized Europeans, so my formative years involved Swiss chocolate whenever I had it. Swiss chocolate uses milk that has not undergone lipolysis, and their chocolate is very smooth due to a process called conching. Conching is a mixing process with lots of heating and aeration which allows organic acids to evaporate creating a very uniform and smooth textured chocolate without bitter or tangy afternotes.
Probably soda. I think most people enjoy Coke/Pepsi and the other mainstream choices are usually considered superior to the small batch artisan stuff
I’ll allow that with a big asterisk, if you consider Mexican Coke as coke then yes, its one of the best sodas. If not, there are way better options.
Yeah, that’s a good one. The alternative stuff that does get popular is usually intended to hit an entirely different market, rather than a higher-end market. Is it Ollie that’s the new hot thing? It’s being marketed as the “healthy option,” and not high-end soda.
I was thinking that the answers here are generally gonna be products that are cheap/synthetic by nature. High quality chocolate has to be high-quality-sourced. High quality soda with the particular flavor that people like exists to the extent that bubbly sugar water can be high-quality.
Good answer.
Bourbon - The little indy distillers just don’t have the ability to wait the 4 to 10 years for the bourbon to age.
Cling wrap, the store brand is absolute garbage. The cutting edge sucks and the wrap just tangles up in itself so easily.
Cling wrap, the store brand is absolute garbage
…unless that store is Costco.
Kirkland Signature cling wrap is the best. And the “Easy Cutter” is the best thing to ever happen to cling wrap.
You got a point there. No Costco here, yet at least
I think it’s hard to fit software into this question because typically when a product is made, there isn’t as large of a need to make a cheaper / more accessible product on account of larger teams typically meaning faster features, and cracked versions existing. They exist, but they’re almost always less feature-complete, and there’s a different type of user that seeks out an open-source alternative.
That said, I think FFmpeg is a good entry here.
imagined a world where Hershey’s…as the best chocolate
Damn, that would be a sad world, I guess 75% of the chocolate companies must have got destroyed or something, cause Hershey’s taste like corn and it’s disgusting
I’m genuinely having trouble thinking of a consumer product where the most widely sold brand or version is the “best” (highest quality, most durable, most features, best flavor, or whatever meteoric would be used).
I can think of a number of products where getting the “best” is a case of steep diminishing returns compared to the increasing price, and for the purposes of the “average” person the “best” product isn’t any better for them than the mainstream one. The “best” versions of some products are only better for those with the skills to make use of them or the need for the “best” quality or features.
MacBooks.
Plenty of reasons to hate Apple as a company but the hardware and build quality of MacBooks really is second to none. I know several Linux/OSS die-hards who swear by their M1 MBPs.
Wake me up when you can repair one without Apple’s hostility and replace storage and RAM without a soldering iron. Hard pass.
