The fetish that never ends

Yesterday I’ve heard a kind of meme based on a conversation of a couple: the wife asked by WhatsApp ‘could you bring me to an expensive restaurant today, honey?’, to which the husband answered with a suggestion by picture: a gas station. Course that the intention was to joke about the fact that the gasoline is quite expensive, but as usual, it aroused another issue in my mind.
Asking for a dinner in an expensive restaurant means something special based on the price of its menu. She spoke it as something natural, like a bias and not exactly aware, but it spots how the products gain a conception of being special, high-level, something different from all the others, just because it costs much more than the average.
That is an evidence of how goods are involved by fantasy, wishes, personal or social expectations – it reminded me Karl Marx. If it’s pretty much expensive, if it’s used by that Hollywood star or that famous singer of the moment... by this way, a product is not a functional object anymore, like a coat bought to make someone warmer in a winter day. It gains a personality, its own story, brings value, quality or status to whom will use it.
Marx called it commodity fetishism in his The Capital (the best and timeless critique of political economy in capitalism times), from 1867. In addition, I guess there is no better term so far to this relationship between people and products. Marketing has efficiently created it – and keeps feeding this kind of relationship throughout the years, even after so many changes on this field especially in the past decade, with social media, algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning and so on.

Actually, we’re much more assertive nowadays on reaching consumers’ minds from that principle, as all these tools and technologies track our lives, preferences and needs in quite impressive refined ways.

OK, this theme has been exhaustive discussed during the last century and this information legitimates my quick overthinking exercise. However, neither every interpretation is properly the truth, nor ideas should be a totalitarian conspiracy theory. My friend, who was presenting me that meme which was a trigger to those conclusions, also offered a counterpoint: most of us generally tend to assign less value to cheap products. We face them as more common than others, or not devoid from satisfactory quality.
I’m sure she’s right. Maybe it’s some heritage from past generations, or maybe we grew up hearing, for example, that everything which comes from China, Taiwan or other Asian emerging countries are cheaper because don’t work well, or will no longer be useful. A probable bias born by a socioeconomic part of history.
I agree; however, at this previous point, shouldn’t we consider the brands and all the ideas and values spread by them as a relevant part of the commodity fetishism? What about some brands globally known that are much accessible regarding prices, but even though are so wished by most of the consumers?
I keep thinking that even other roots of all the fetishes’ universe are also results of marketing power and fake ideologies at all, on turning objects into ideas of success. Marx has never been so present.