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Poor value vs snake oil...

John Darko has done a good podcast with Jeff Dorgay of TONEaudio on snake oil. This prompts my post, as I think he is onto something.

See:
https://darko.audio/2020/03/podcast-20-snake-oil/

To try and summarise where his head is, he seems to be saying that 
  • Snake oil, (the selling of something worthless as a remedy) is not about price. A $1 rip off is still a rip off. 
  • For something to be snake oil, it must be a confidence trick, e.g. the selling of sugar water as medicine. This is not about value judgements, its about fraud.
  • That selling something that makes a tiny improvement for a lot of money is not snake oil, as there is an improvement, there is an actual product doing something, it is just that it is not worth it. 

I was interested in this topic as a lot of us seem to throw about the "snake oil" insult freely. Those $10k speaker cables are snake oil to someone who only has a $2k system. I think it is worth unpicking this a bit, so we can better insult each other.

So thanks to Mr Darko's musings, here is where my head is:

Snake Oil: this only makes sense from the perspective of the seller. If they know that they are selling lies, selling sugar water as medicine, selling an empty box that does nothing, then they are perpetrating a fraud, and can be called snake oil salespeople. 

So my definition of snake oil is where the seller has no legitimate reason to claim their product brings any benefit. If they can't show that some people get benefit, or can point to measurable change, then they are knowingly selling a lie. 

Now I totally accept that there are many many products out there that are not worth their sticker price, but this is an entirely different concept to snake oil. Snake oil is about the mind of the seller, where as "worth" is in the mind of the buyer. We, the buyers are the judge of value (worth), we all have different opinions, and who is to say who is right. 

So if my neighbour spends the cost of a good car on some speaker cables, I can moan about her wasting money, but it would be incorrect to say she has bought snake oil. Her cables are demonstrably physically different from my bell wire, so she has got something for her cash. I just don't think she got enough value for her money, which is a judgement call, and hey, she just might be a heck of a lot richer than me. 

I will end with an example:

Say I sell hair conditioner which I make at home by filling nice looking bottles with water from my faucet. I sell each bottle for $100 and make up lots of quotes from satisfied customers saying how it changed their lives. Well, if I did that I would say I am a snake oil salesman.

But say that instead of filling with water, I fill my bottles with conditioner I bought down at the drug store for $2 a bottle. I sell my bottles in nice store, or at an artisanal market, and a few people tweet that it works really well, and I use their quotes in my ads...  then I think I am not a snake oil salesman, but a businessman. It would not be my problem that my customers are getting poor value. Hey, that is their problem. Maybe they really like my bottle. 
 
128x128rols

Showing 1 response by rols

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rols OP
22 posts
 
rols, his definition of snake oil is an audio product that makes no improvement in either measurement or sound quality.
Mjostyn: I agree with everything you say, and yes, Mr Darko did suggest that snake oil could be defined as a product that offers no measurable improvement or sound quality. The trouble with this view is that one ends up in the weeds with what is an improvement, and all the problems of measurement.

Instead I suggest that a way to simplify this is to focus on what is in the head of the manufacturer: If they know that they are selling snake oil, i.e. that they know that they are lying, then they are snake oil salespeople, and their product is snake oil. I care not if one of us thinks it works, I care only about what is in the head of the maker.

Another silly example to try and illustrate this way of looking at it. Say I think that washing my cables in the Thames makes them sound cleaner, so I buy boxes of cable, and wash them in that river, and sell them as "Thames Washed", then in my view I am not selling snake oil, just a low value add product. However if I do not bother to actually do the washing, maybe because I found that it made no difference, then I am now doing a fraud, ripping people off with what is now snake oil. 
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