Of course you can also use the same reasoning to buy the cheapest-available option regardless of quality in everything you do. Live in a tiny studio apartment.

Of course you can also use the same reasoning to buy the cheapest-available option regardless of quality in everything you do. Live in a tiny studio apartment. Wear ten-dollar Walmart jeans and whatever t-shirts you can obtain for free. But if you're earning a decent income the only result of this is that you wind up dead with millions of dollars in cash in the bank. What's the point? Unless you're at the poverty line, it's rational to pay a bit more to get stuff that's more enjoyable. (And if you are at the poverty line, you shouldn't be buying vodka at all). Whether it's worth paying 50% more for Grey Goose rather than Smirnoff is an entirely personal decision and depends whether you actually like it better... personally I don't like vodka much anyway. My point: there's a lot of stupid overconsumption going on out there, but Grey Goose Vodka, being a probably-better product at a modestly higher price, isn't really a good symbol of it.