Another item for our ongoing collection of ridiculously overpriced merchandise. It's duct tape from designer Raf Simons with the phrase "Walk With Me" stamped on it. Yours for only $286.
Or you could buy a roll of duct tape at Home Depot for $5.
Raf Simons also sells jeans with a "duct tape detail at back." They usually go for $504.08, but right now they're on sale for only $252.04.
Hidden Valley has made it possible to buy a mini keg of ranch dressing for $50. This gets you five liters of ranch, or 169 fl oz. The keg is conveniently stackable, in case you need more than one.
Fortune.com worked out that you can buy 160 oz of ranch in bottles for $30. So you're paying a $20 premium for the keg.
If you have $1000 to spare, you can buy a tin can from Tiffany. As far as tin cans go, it's a very nice one. It's made with "Sterling silver and vermeil with Tiffany Blue enamel accent." But at the end of the day, it's still a tin can.
Nordstrom is now selling pre-dirtied jeans for $425. And here I've been washing my jeans all these years! It reminds me of that guy back in the 90s who sold shotgun-blasted jeans, though his prices were more reasonable.
I wonder if the dirt washes off.
For slightly cheaper ($395) you can get what looks like paint-stained jeans.
The latest ridiculously overpriced merchandise making headlines is the Balenciaga large shopper bag, which sells for $2150. A lot of people have been pointing out that it looks suspiciously similar to IKEA's "frakta" shopping bag, which sells for $0.99.
However, the two bags are not identical. The Balenciaga bag is made of leather. The IKEA bag is plastic.
They're charging $2000 for the whole pizza (I don't think they sell it by the slice). For that you get a wood-fired pizza "topped with stilton cheese, foie gras, truffles, caviar, and 24-karat gold flakes."
Swedish beer-maker St. Erik's Brewery recently debuted the world's most expensive potato chip. A box of 5 chips cost 499 kr, or around $56, which comes out to about $11 per chip.
They're made with a bunch of fancy-sounding ingredients: Matsutake, Truffle Seaweed, Crown Dill, Leksand Onion, India Pale Ale Wort, and Ammarnäs Potatoes.
However, you can no longer get your hands on any of these chips because the beer-maker only made 100 boxes of them, and they've already sold out.
Life has gotten a little easier for the juice-loving super-rich. For a mere $700 they can now buy the Juicero — the world's first wi-fi connected juicer.
Oddly, the device can't actually juice produce from a store or farm. Instead, you have to buy packages of pre-cut vegetables/fruits from the Juicero company (adding to the cost). The device then squeezes the veggies inside the proprietary packs, so the only clean-up required is to discard the used pack. The device automatically orders more packs when you're about to run out (this is the purpose of the wi-fi connection).
I think I'll stick with snacking on non-squeezed raw vegetables — cheaper, minimal clean-up, and (I believe) healthier than juice.
What does a bored billionaire do when he's temporarily run out of hundred-dollar bills to light his cigars with? Now he can turn his champagne bottles into spray guns and soak guests with premium bubbly!
If you need to ask how much this costs, then you're not part of the target market. (It's $495)
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.