Luxury brands have always made low end products for the petite bourgeoisie. Their products offerings are deliberate pyramids of increasing artificial scarcity w

Luxury brands have always made low end products for the petite bourgeoisie. Their products offerings are deliberate pyramids of increasing artificial scarcity which many clever people have wasted lives designing. ‘Just charge for the check mark’ seems quite likely to fail in the ways your interlocutor alludes. Moreover, this particular status symbol is explicitly not a marker of wealth, but rather of a more nebulous type of status.