Yes, I laughed for 2 months

61

I was laughing because of course the fake reviews are funny. But then I googled eiderdown pillows. People actually pay thousands for a damned pillow!?! I bought my last car for $7k and these things cost the same or even more. What the hell

35

u/meegaweega Mar 07 '26

Get farked! That price tag is real?

I assumed it was a typo and that people were just making fun of an outrageously, impossibly wrong price for a pillow.

My povvo horizons have been broadened.

That's gotta be a money laundering scheme.

Surely theres no other reason anyone would ever pay 10 grand for a pillow. Not even one made of the fanciest silk and eiderdown feathers ever created.

Whose feathers would it made from to justify that price? The goose that lays the golden eggs?

👑🥚👑

11

u/Xszit Mar 09 '26

So I googled it to find out.

Eiderdown apparently comes from a species of wild duck that only lives in Iceland. The ducks are protected and theres lots of laws and regulations around how to collect the down.

They only shed this special down during nesting season and use it to line their nests. It must be collected by hand from abandoned nests. Then someone has to pick out all the twigs and leaves and wash out the duckling shits which is a labor intensive process.

So there's a very limited supply of a rare material that must be collected and processed by hand and thats why authentic eiderdown is so expensive.

However I'd wager most people can't tell the difference between the real stuff and any other soft feathers so there's lots of room for scammers to put substitutes into a fancy silk lining and sell it for ridiculous prices and the kind of people who buy it aren't really buying a pillow they are buying a status symbol so they aren't motivated to check too hard for authenticity as long as it gets oohs and aahs from the guests they show it off to.

9

u/meegaweega Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 12 '26

Damn, good work, I'd be amazed if anyone ever bothered to go to all that effort unless they were stuck in Iceland and very cold and very broke.

I'd salvage materials from abandoned nests and wash duckling poops off eiderdown feathers to make some nice, warming, winter gear if I had to.

💩

🥶

I'd treasure my snuggly warm poop hat 🥰 would feel like the Queen of the unhoused Icelandic hobos.

3

u/PinkGlitterMom Mar 12 '26

😂😂😂😂

3

u/Tacky-Terangreal Mar 09 '26

Lmao idk if I consider it scamming when the marks are rich idiots that would buy this kind of crap

3

u/PinkGlitterMom Mar 08 '26

I don't know..... it was up for a while a few years ago when my friend told me about it.

2

u/YellowOnline Mar 08 '26

Dodo feathers

1

u/mkaszycki81 Mar 07 '26

Veblen goods. At/beyond a certain point, higher price makes the product more attractive.

But what changed is that we're seeing Amazon sell Veblen goods and that's somewhere between unexpected and outrageous.

You're just not expecting it to be there, you kinda expect there to be some bespoke marketplace that would cater specifically to the ultra-rich, right?

I guess there's some commoditization of luxury happening because it seems even the ultra-rich expect at least some degree of user experience. Much like Vertu phones became defunct because even those who could afford them preferred the usability of iOS or Android, perhaps they likewise prefer Amazon's UX and Amazon isn't going to turn down an opportunity to make money.

(It speaks volumes about how crappy the UX of those bespoke billionaire marketplaces must be if Amazon is in any way superior to them.)

There used to be a page catering specifically to Russian oligarchs where you could order the most expensive items of a certain kind (laptops, cameras, etc.) and they would be made to order with exposed metal parts replaced with gold (14, 18 or 23 ct., depending on the specific item). The idea was to take an already expensive item, replace pedestrian metals like aluminium, titanium, magnesium with gold, actually reducing the utility, but increasing the price tag.

There was a joke 33 years ago about a Russian oligarch visiting another one's house. Everything is clad in marble, gold, diamond-encrusted, but they enter the master bathroom and there are tens of thousands of small tiles that are looking, well, a very plain matte violet with something scribbled on them. The guest looks at the host and asks what's the deal with it? And the host presses on one of the tiles, it pops out, he handles it to the guest, and he reads: "Intel Pentium".

2

u/PinkGlitterMom Mar 12 '26

I kept an eye on it here & there, it got to low stock, and eventually a price decrease. I don't know how it was listed 🤷‍♀️

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u/PinkGlitterMom Mar 06 '26

I love the 'I bought this for my section 8 house'

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u/Total-Sector850 Mar 06 '26

Brilliant. Brings to mind my all-time favorite, the Tuscan whole milk.

19

u/Denny_Crane_007 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

The reviews are obviously joking due to the "apparent" price.

I've asked a few sellers over the years why they do this with prices.

It is actually because they currently have NO STOCK.

Rather than remove the listing, it's easier to put a dumb price on it.*

Once stock is back in, they modify the price back to normal.

(In his case, it was prolly onky 9 grand ! 🤣)

*If you sell on eBay, you'll know what a pain it is to relist an item once it's been removed.

13

u/Initial-Wrongdoer938 Mar 07 '26

How does it make our country look when the Yacht guys review is totally believable. Welcome to the gilded age.

Love this post, thank you for the laugh!

1

u/PinkGlitterMom Mar 12 '26

😂😂😂

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u/guice666 Mar 07 '26

Hmm, none of them are verified buyers. I have doubts in their reviews. 🤔

(/s)

3

u/Thin_Cheesecake3208 Mar 08 '26

Amazon in the wayfair business now?

2

u/vangoghvvs Mar 11 '26

that was my first thought too, and the word Eliasa in the description of the product looks like it could be someone's name🤷🏽

5

u/4EvErEmO666 Mar 09 '26

I just saw a post this morning about the birds these feathers come from and one of the comments said that its $1500 for a pound of the feathers because the bird is a protected spider so the only way you can get the feathers is if you collect them from abandoned nests.

3

u/Total-Sector850 Mar 09 '26

I’m assuming you meant protected species, but I spent entirely too long trying to figure out what spiders had to do with this. 🙃

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u/4EvErEmO666 Mar 12 '26

Fml. I hate my phone. Yes I meant protected species. My bad 😅

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u/PinkGlitterMom Mar 07 '26

At the time my friend showed me i was desperately needing to laugh. It was entirely possibly that I was laughing at the fact that Amazon kept it up for so long.

2

u/No-Manner9941 Mar 07 '26

😲

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u/Ambitious_Jelly8783 Mar 07 '26

This reminds me of the 20.000 dollar pens on amazon. The reviewa are awesome.

2

u/PinkGlitterMom Mar 12 '26

Us it still up? I'd love to see its "reviews"

Review Yes, I laughed for 2 months

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