You wouldn’t
pay $30 for a can of soup. Or $80 for an undershirt. Yet many people pay close
to $300 for a pair of jeans. Whatever happened to the Lee Jeans era? In a
flash, our price threshold for jeans has jumped from $30 to $300. And it is not
just jeans that have suddenly gone ultra-premium — it’s watches, gym clothes,
coffee and even peanut butter.
Dan Heath
and Chip Heath have written a book called Made
to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.1 They believe that products make the leap
from ordinary to premium when their creators think of them as “ideas.” A pair
of jeans used to be seen as a product that was workmanlike, durable, casual.
But now people look for something else — they look for the idea of “the perfect
pair of jeans.”
The problem
is, you have to pay for “the perfect
pair of jeans.” Workers now take each of these pairs of jeans and use a piece
of sandpaper to scrape away at certain spots on the leg in order to create the
color fade that designers desire. They turn regular jeans into works of art.
And then they charge $300.
The idea of a perfect commandment
Dan and
Chip Heath are onto something when they say that things make the leap from the
ordinary to the premium when they become seen as “ideas.” The idea of the
perfect pair of jeans. The idea of an exceptional cup of coffee. Or the idea of
a Great Commandment.
Yes, that’s
right: not just a commandment, but a perfect
commandment. In the Gospel of Mark, a Jewish scr
