Inspired by the TV discussion in the “buy this” thread.
Sony. I have bought plenty of electronics over the years, but have owned very few Sony products, primarily a couple of TVs in the early 2000s. One was a bix boxy DLP TV and the other was a ~36" CRT TV. I almost certainly looked at them compared to the next one in the store and thought they were worth the premium price at the time, but both were very much “meh” overall.
I have otherwise looked at Sony price tags and wondered why they were so much higher than comparable models from other brands. I realize a TV from this era is a really bad case to judge the brand given everything rapidly changed in the coming years and that all quickly dated my purchases, but I have found few reasons in general to ever consider them.
A second one is Starbucks. I am a coffee snob with an espresso machine at home, but have never found their coffee to be all that great, either from the shop directly, or made at home. Seems mostly like the same coffee bean roasted to various levels of dark or burnt. The roast level itself can’t be the problem as I use dark roasts all the time at home and make good coffee. It’s better than most gas station coffee but not something I am going to search out.
Jules: Mmmm! Goddamn, Jimmie! This is some serious gourmet shit! Usually, me and Vince would be happy with some freeze-dried Taster’s Choice right, but he springs this serious GOURMET shit on us! What flavor is this?
Jimmie: I don’t need you to tell me how fucking good my coffee is, okay? I’m the one who buys it. I know how good it is. When Bonnie goes shopping she buys SHIT. I buy the gourmet expensive stuff because when I drink it I want to taste it. But you know what’s on my mind right now? It AIN’T the coffee in my kitchen, it’s the dead ****** in my garage.
I feel like Sony was an interesting brand 20-30 years ago. A lot of what they made was mass market, fine but nothing special.
But they had a lot of interesting products. The ES line of home audio gear was quite good, the XES line of car audio was $$$ but it was serious. The WEGA TVs were as good as it got - well, until Pioneer started making plasmas.
But these days, they aren’t making anything interesting like those products. I think their TVs are still good but when I needed a TV last year I wound up with an LG OLED.
Same. I can tolerate the veranda and holiday blends. Everything else is roasted to a char. We have a local roaster who consistently produces amazing coffee, and last time I was in the grocery store I happened to glance at Starbucks and discovered the local stuff is actually cheaper. And the local stuff has the roast date stamped on it, it is very fresh coffee, often so fresh it’s not done off-gassing and needs to sit for another week.
