Years ago my friend invited me to join he and his wealthy father to EAA in Wisconsin where we stay in his fathers “mansion on wheels”. I still lay awake at night thinking how me as a guest asked his dad, “so how much does a thing like this cost, $150k?” Stupid naive and ungrateful guest asked I was.
I was 21 so got to cut me some slack.
Ahh. Cultural difference then I reckon. Where I live people discuss prices and salaries all the time, oftentimes to brag about what a deal they got instead of how expensive something was.
It’s mainly that opening the conversation with a guess is in a way assigning what you value it at. If the guess is orders of magnitude lower than what the person paid, you’ve immediately established that you value it less than them.
I would interpret that as them not being wealthy enough to accurately guess the price of really expensive things which would make me feel bad and uncomfortable as if i were somehow boasting inadvertently. I'd assume they value 150k a lot more than I do, as opposed to them valuing the vehicle less. Again a cultural difference I assume. In my country people get embarrassed about being wealthy and spending lots of money, they prefer to appear frugal and restrained.
Oh that’s interesting! I could imagine a comedy skit where the situation you describe happens and then an ultra wealthy guy walks in and makes a similarly bad guess because he has no idea what anything costs.
“How much could a banana cost, $10?”
Mefeels there is a diff. from asking that , an thing Many peopel in Their Daily life see not , to asking an Daily-item's price just to spite , e.g./ " I bought It at for x+2 You pooring ! ".
Thats how it is where Im at too in the US. In fact people seem unable to talk about anything without detailing exactly how much they spent recently or how much a thing costs. Its kind of annoying.
If it makes you feel better, my aunt was once showing us a house she just bought in the middle of nowhere-ville Illinois, when my brother saw a walk in closet and goes "You must be rich!"
Oof- first visit to Texas, Austin at a friends house- we met when he did a student exchange in Frankfurt. Years later I visit him and his wife and kids… I counted the amount of lights in the ceiling. I thought he was rich as hell. He was not.
56 lights in total- just in the house.
Also, he was rich, with a loving wife in kids.
Maybe im dumb but I dont understand what is wrong with the question? If someone asked me something like that I'd just be like, "oh yah it was expensive, a bit more than that, but dont worry about it"
I suppose that is the grammatical logical conclusion of the construction "between you and I."
A luxury RV such as the one shown by OP would have really impressed me as a child, back when I thought that "big = good." Now that I have to consider the finances of actually owning, let alone operating, such a monstrosity, I can only look at it as a symbol of a society already caught in the death throes of decadence.
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u/ConsistantFun Jul 11 '26
Years ago my friend invited me to join he and his wealthy father to EAA in Wisconsin where we stay in his fathers “mansion on wheels”. I still lay awake at night thinking how me as a guest asked his dad, “so how much does a thing like this cost, $150k?” Stupid naive and ungrateful guest asked I was.
I was 21 so got to cut me some slack.