For decades now, certain shops don't just sell stuff, they sell the “experience” of shopping there. I'd like to have what their PR departments are smoking.
It's _all_ experience. "Don't sell the sausage, sell the sizzle".
This is why car adverts are either belting round implausibly empty urban streets, or of Wankpanzers off-roading in a way almost no owner will actually do. "Buy this and this is the experience you're connecting with".
I'm rather confused by the article's point. It really reinforces that it's all experience, and really, material goods are just a means to an end.
Look - if I want to go experience Bali, it's not like I have to buy an aeroplane to do so. We _vastly_ overestimate the marginal utility of a more expensive car or some slightly different shoes in the sense of what additional experiences it's going to give us.
And, frankly, if you're claiming your shoe purchases increase your wellbeing because they don't hurt then I might suggest you pay more attention to purchasing the correct size for your feet (Stop buying from the Dolmansaxlil shoe corporation).
ISTR that materialistic humans being on a hedonic treadmill has quite a lot of evidence.
I'm not sure what you're pointing at, but all shops are selling a shopping experience.
Compare a hard discount grocery store to a regular supermarket, and we see the supermarket invisting significant money (and increasing prices) to improve the customer experience, and many customers willing to pay the price to not shop in what looks like a warehouse, even if they'd buy roughly the same products.
Yes, almost from the start, it sounded to me like something cooked up by marketing experts, either:
* to sell "experiences" to people because those marketers had services to sell;
* to sell "experiences" to people because the target demographic couldn't afford possessions; or
* more a psyop campaign, to placate demographics for whom the memes are that they'll never own a home, never be able to retire, etc.
Or all three.
Sure, there was the random carefree person who just liked to surf every day, and somehow ends got met, but for the rest of us, we were sold on expectations of homeownership, vehicles, consumer products. We can see that society is set up to expect people to have those things, and we can see how people's experience is generally better when they can afford those possessions.
It's not wrong either, though. Experiences regularly and radically change people: you might not have been longing all your life to own a French castle looking at rich pictures if you actually went into one and experienced the humidity, gloominess and sheer impracticality of it all first hand.
Sending people to the other side of the world is overrated, but confronting your world views with actual experiences is a price worth paying most of the time.
Same way experiencing at least once a well cooked, well made dish can effectively lead you cook it better for the rest of your life.
As anything, it varies from people to people, and there's no single truth out there.
It's not just about worldviews - it's having to face the unfamiliar and unpredictable that tends to change people. The best travels are voyages of discovery about oneself.
However, not every trip can be that. The more you travel, the weaker the experience becomes, and eventually one reaches a point where there is little left to learn by being on the road.