Hey y'all, it's not that I don't understand paying a lot for a really good instrument. I do, and I have. But there is a huge difference between three thousand dollars and whatever this Ukulele is eventually going to sell for. And even money says that one or more of my three thousand dollar Ukes is a better instrument than the one being auctioned off. So, the value, if it's actually there, of this Uke is not as a musical instrument, but as something else. Like I said, a work of art, or a collectable. Whoever pays that much for that Uke had better be sure that it can be held and resold at a profit at a later time. Otherwise, the buyer is just throwing money away.
I have a Honda Civic for which I paid about $20,000. It gets me reliably (knock wood) from one place to another. Some people pay upwards of $100,000 for a car which, oddly enough, gets them from place to place, just like my car does. What is it about a $100,000 car that makes it worth five times as much as my car?
I have a Movado wrist watch that cost $300 when I bought it about 30 years ago. I could have paid thousands of dollars for a watch, but I didn't because mine tells the time as well as a $5,000 watch (and if not quite as well, we're talking milliseconds, about which nobody cares). There is clearly a market for $5,000 watches or the people who make them wouldn't make them. So what is it about a $5,000 watch that makes it more than ten times more valuable than my attractive, accurate, reliable Movado watch?
The thing is, different people value different things differently. There are people out there who are willing to pay an additional $80,000 for a car in order to have whatever it is about a $100,000 car that makes it worth $100,000. Whatever that is, it certainly isn't merely transporting someone from one place to another reliably. There are people out there willing to pay $5,000 for a watch in order to have whatever makes that watch worth $5,000. Whatever that is, it certainly isn't telling time, because of that was all that was wanted, there are cheaper ways to obtain it.
I have more than one Moore Bettah, and I think I'm a little crazy for spending $10,000 on an ukulele (for what it's worth, two of them were significantly less expensive and one was slightly more expensive). But they are the nicest instruments I have ever played, and being able to play them gives me great joy. Yes, my $1,200 Kamaka plays the notes and responds to strumming, as do my MBUs. Whatever it is that caused me to want to pay $10,000 for an MBU, it wasn't merely that it can make musical sounds when I pluck or strum the strings. I pay extra for the experience of playing these instruments (and being able to listen to them as I play them), just like the owner of a $100,000 car finds something other than being transported from one place to another that gives him or her joy during the experience of using it, in addition to whatever joy he or she gets from merely being transported from one place to another.
Almost everyone has something that they could have gotten the same function out of buying a different brand of that thing for a lot less. TVs and stereo systems come to mind. In the same way that some people aren't content to drive a Honda or aren't content to tell time with a Movado or a Timex, someone out there has a stereo system that would blow mine away. We all value some thing or another for the incidental pleasure they give us, even if there are less expensive alternatives for performing the same function.
