Magenta Notebooks Hotel and Restaurant Reviews: Corrupt Luxury
I delay actual reviews for another week to give further thoughts on the corruption of hotel, restaurant and travel systems… and the new mass-luxury economy that is its own type of sheep-shearing.
This is a follow up to the introduction to this series you can read here,
Magenta Notebooks Hotel and Restaurant Reviews: Introduction
The United States is a sheep-shearing operation and one of the easiest ways to see the giant fraud is to look at hotel prices in other countries. This includes countries developed or not…or even just compare to the expectations of common sense. In 2015 or so you could get a very basic but decent room in central Madrid, a few blocks from the opera house, for about $30 per night. This was your own proper hotel room, with private bathroom, daily cleaning and so on, not a hostel, in one of Europe’s most pleasant cities. I’ve paid in the past even less for a room with private bathroom in a “pension” outside the central plazas of Lisbon. Around 2000-2005, you could get such a room for $5 a night. They had at the time a freaklike beggar with elephantiasis outside the Praca Figueira in the center, besides African idlers by the subway stations selling posters with a map of Angola. Prices are a bit higher now in the gentrified and happy Lisbon that’s a refuge for American tech and crypto profes…
On top of the general scam-call-center nature of the everyday economy in America since at least the 1990’s, there’s also the parallel phenomenon of a glut of new rich, flush with cash but not sense, who live to get rinsed by whores and whore-a-likes in the supposed luxury-purveyor sectors.
Since at least the year 2000 marketing to “the rich” has been a scam. Why is it possible in most of the world to rip off those who want to spend money or on occasion splurge? Tokyo is the world’s largest luxuries market. For a people with relatively good taste sharpened by centuries…
