Shaquille O’Neal once walked into a Rolls-Royce dealership in Lakers sweats, in his own words “looking like a bum”, and started asking how much one car cost, then another, then another. The old salesman, unimpressed, finally said: “You asked about all these cars — can you afford them?”

Shaq got mad. So he bought three cars, which cost roughly $1.3 million. “That one that one and that…and I want them dropped off.” He has admitted he barely drives them. And, ironically, the very person who insulted him presumably financially benefitted from the deal.

So here’s the uncomfortable question: does rudeness have a positive expected value?

For almost every business on earth, rudeness is a cost — a lost sale, a one-star review, a customer who never comes back. And then there’s the world of luxury, where being made to feel small is, apparently, part of the product.

Here’s the weird part. Rudeness itself, properly deployed, is a financial multiplier—but only for the right brands, with the right customers, at the right time.

There’s real research on this. So, today, let’s price rudeness as an unusual asset.

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What does the research actually say?

The headline comes from a 2014 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research with the best title in the field: “Should the Devil Sell Prada?” Across four studies, Morgan Ward and Darren Dahl had a salesperson greet a shopper condescendingly and measured the fallout. Counterintuitively, both attitude and willingness to pay went up. They called it the “Pretty Woman effect.”

Shaq is almost the opposite of their subject — he wasn’t an aspiring outsider hoping to be let in, he was a rich man who’d been insulted1 — but both run on the same circuit: a snub questions your worth, and some people answer with a purchase. Aspiration and wounded pride are different buttons; the sneer presses both.

Here’s the honest part, though. The effect only fired under tight conditions: an aspirational brand (it backfired for Gap or H&M), a shopper who tied the brand to their ideal self, and a snob who credibly “reflected the brand.” And the kicker the viral write-ups skipped — it decayed fast. Within about two weeks, snubbed shoppers curdled: they wanted to buy in the moment, then turned sharply negative. Dahl himself warned the strategy fails long-term. The snub is a real asset with roughly the shelf life of a bunch of flowers.

Let’s actually price it (back of the envelope)

Ok so how might we think about the value of this strategy on a per-interaction basis?

Start with a real anchor: a popular Louis Vuitton bag — a Neverfull or Speedy — runs about $2,000.

Let’s say a fresh snub nudges an aspiring shopper’s odds of buying that visit up by 5 percentage points.

• Per qualifying aspirant: $2,000 × 5% ≈ $100 of expected extra sales per snub.

So even being generous, a sneer is not worth very much per interaction — with a two-week fuse, and only counting impulse buys it pulls forward. Now subtract the cost: the same snub reliably repels loyal and non-aspirational customers, for whom the effect runs in reverse. Lose even one $2,000 regular for good every twenty snubs and the whole strategy goes underwater. The expected value is small, fragile, and probably negative at scale.

So, running the numbers this way, this strategy seems dumb. But it’s also seemingly widespread. Velvet-roped lines at luxury stores are common. People regularly wait for the opportunity to spend money at these stores. And even if we add in big spenders like Shaq, it seems unreasonable that this strategy would work. Rolls Royce’s are big-ticket products with huge profit margins. Selling three is a huge amount of profit—far more than selling five LV bags.

So maybe we should rethink things.

But maybe rudeness is just an initiation rite

Luxury staff aren’t rude to everyone. In fact, the snub effect reverses for loyal insiders. Staff at these stores are rude at the threshold and then ultra warm once you’re in. The coldness is a bouncer, not the club. Once you’re a big spender, you get all sorts of benefits.

This is apparently how top luxury stores operate. Frosty to the unknown walk-in, lavish to the established client. You don’t get offered a Birkin until you’ve built a purchase history, shown up, become known. But once you have, you get free champagne while shopping.

There’s harder psychology under this than the Prada study. In a classic 1959 experiment, Aronson and Mills found that people made to endure an embarrassing initiation to join a group ended up liking that group more than people who got in easily. Effort justification: if getting in cost you something — a wait, a sting, your dignity — your mind decides it must have been worth it. A snub at the door ironically manufactures loyalty.

So, let’s redo it thinking of it that way. A committed luxury client doesn’t buy one bag; they spend maybe $5,000–15,000 a year for a decade or two — call it $50,000–300,000 in lifetime sales. If a well-aimed snub raises the odds of minting a member (not making a sale) by even a point or two, the expected value isn’t $100 — it’s hundreds to low thousands of dollars per qualifying interaction. (More on that soon).

Looking at it this way, the snub is not about pushing someone for a one-time sale, it’s a pressure tactic to see who is willing to become a member.

This also reconciles the awkward fact that the study’s effect decays in two weeks. The lab measured the snub in isolation— a sting with no second act, no club to be welcomed into. Real luxury supplies the second act: the aspirant who pushes through the cold gate eventually gets the warmth.

And most people want to justify their purchases.

Another thing about luxury: The member becomes free advertising. A monogram bag is conspicuous by design. Every convert manufactures the next cohort of aspiring outsiders, who walk in, get screened at the gate, and (if the brand plays it right) get initiated in turn. Members advertise the club; the advertising breeds aspirants; the snub screens the aspirants; the new members advertise. It’s a self-perpetuating aspiration engine.

Scarcity enables the snub

The snub is only possible due to scarcity. If everyone already had a LV bag, they’d be seen as less prestigious.

So, the sneer (”you can’t afford this”) and the waitlist (”you’re not allowed to buy this yet”) are the two parts of the same strategy.

Birkin bags often resell above retail — the structured Sellier Birkin ran about 183% of its original price on Rebag’s 2025 index, and Birkin resale values are apparently up roughly 92% over the decade, outpacing Hermès’s own retail hikes. Louis Vuitton ran the experiment on purpose: it moved the classic Neverfull bag to a waitlist in May 2023, and resale retention promptly stepped up. (Side note: Why doesn’t this bag have a French name?) Ferrari does it in metal — you can’t get its halo cars (such as a LaFerrari) without a history of owning the prior greats, and when Justin Bieber broke the code by modifying and auctioning a 458, it reportedly cut him off from the special editions. Nevertheless, Bieber claimed he was in line to get a LaFerarri, likely due to an agreement to repurchase one at a premium from another buyer. Build the right history and the best ones come to you; break the rules and the gate shuts.

Scarcity itself is kind of a snub, and for the right customer, and the right brand, it works.

So what’s the expected value of rudeness?

To price rudeness, maybe we need to step back and acknowledge rudeness is just one part of an even more important aspect of luxury: Scarcity and status. Rudeness is just part of the scarcity filtering mechanism.

Perhaps a better question is: how many more people become long-term clients under a cold, scarce, status-gated experience than under a warm, equally scarce one?

Suppose 100 qualified aspirants walk in. Under a warm-but-scarce system, maybe six become long-term clients. Under a cold-and-scarce system, maybe eight do. If each long-term client is worth $30,000–$100,000 in lifetime sales, rudeness is not worth all eight clients. It is worth the two-client lift: roughly $60,000–$200,000 in extra lifetime sales, before subtracting the customers it alienates.

That still sounds strange, but the bar is lower than it seems. The sneer doesn’t have to convert everyone. It only has to move a few edge cases: the customer who wants the bag but feels unsure, the shopper who can technically afford it but needs emotional permission to be extravagant, the aspirant who hears “you may not belong here” and decides to prove otherwise.

In that sense, rudeness is not just a sales tactic. It’s a pressure tactic, and it is a forcing mechanism. For some customers, politeness lets them drift away. Coldness creates a decision point: leave and be an outsider, or buy and join the club.

But even this may understate the effect, because in real luxury, rudeness rarely works alone. It is one visible part of a larger exclusivity system: scarcity, waitlists, purchase histories, limited access, and the emotional reward of eventually being recognized. A waitlist says the product is hard to get. A frosty salesperson says access itself is conditional. Together, they turn inventory management into a social trial.

So perhaps the asset is not rudeness exactly. It is the rudeness factor: the added value created when scarcity feels personal. The real question is not “does a rude salesperson create a customer?” It is: “does coldness make the scarcity feel more real?”

And it seems the answer is yes.

Why does being denied raise the price?

Luxury isn’t selling goods; it’s selling access, and access only signals status if it’s withheld from someone else. Social-rejection psychology backs this: being rejected often makes people elevate the rejecter and try harder to get in.

A club anyone can enter stops being a club. Exclusivity means, well, some exclusion will happen.

So the cold salesperson, the velvet rope, the sold-out drop, and the multi-year Birkin queue all do the same job — costly proof that the thing is hard to get, which is the whole reason to want it. When everyone can have it instantly, the dream dies. Yes, a lot of this is just a symbol.

Overrated or underrated?

As a strategy, it splits. Rudeness as rudeness is overrated. When the Steve Jobs book came out, and it was revealed how difficult he was, jerks on LinkedIn used Jobs’ harsh manner as an excuse to “push teams harder” which often just means being a jerk. And there are real costs to that strategy. Jobs had a prickly personality with real downsides—he denied his first daughter was his, cannily structured his child support payments to be as low as possible just before he became wildly rich, and was apparently rude to service staff if they made a minor mistake. Yet these downsides didn’t stop his business success, given his visionary taste, passion for innovation, care for the customer experience, and incredible salesmanship. Try to copy Job’s in other fields and it might not work out so well.

And the Shaq strategy can only work in very specific circumstances. A coffee shop betting that being rude to a billionaire will cause him to buy 10,000 coffees is delusional.

But rudeness as initiation — cold at the threshold, devoted once you’re in — is still probably underrated as a cynical pricing strategy, if you price it right, because the prize isn’t a sale, it’s a high-lifetime-value member who then advertises for free.

If you consider rudeness to strangers the cost of converting some of them into loyal members, then rudeness that functions as a screening device is really just a cheap (albeit polarizing) customer acquisition strategy. I suppose, this fits with these brand’s strategies, as exclusivity has to be a verb—it’s not just about letting the right people in, it’s also keeping the “wrong” people out, even if that hurts some feelings along the way.

Which is kind of sad but, probably a good business model.

Customers who push past the snub are also buying the reassurance that they’re the kind of person who gets let in. That’s a genuinely unusual asset, and it’s probably worth exactly as much as your need to be let in.

So what’s a snub worth? On average, very little. But sometimes, it’s worth three Rolls-Royces.

Asset: Luxury rudeness

Comparable assets: Velvet ropes, waitlists, private clubs, “sold out” drops, maitre d’ indifference

Risk: Alienates loyal/non-aspirational customers; becomes tacky if overused

Estimated value: Usually near zero or negative; occasionally worth thousands per qualified aspirant — and once in a while, three Rolls-Royces.

For more pieces that blend academic research with real-world outcomes, check out The Studies Show, by Alexander Webb.

This post, like all Unusual Assets posts, is for entertainment and educational purposes only and is not financial, legal, or any kind of advice.

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You can’t buy it, sell it, or borrow against it — but some research suggests a single inch is worth $30,000—at least on dating apps.

This article explains why that exact price is probably wrong in dating, how it’s nonetheless getting truer every year, and how $30,000 per inch strangely exactly on the money in other ways.

Is an inch of male height is worth $30,000?

This seemingly bizarre headline number comes from a famous online-dating study by Hitsch, Hortaçsu, and Ariely, which found that a 5’6” man needed about $175,000 more income to be as desirable as a 6’0” man.

Divide by six inches and you get the viral version: one inch of male height, worth nearly $30,000 a year. But, there’s more to the story.

First, a little about the research itself. While I think this result is directionally true, and getting truer every year, it’s worth knowing that nobody in the study actually traded $175,000 for height.

It’s an extrapolation from the fact that women messaged tall rich guys, tall guys, and rich guys first, and so $175,000 is the theoretical number a 5’6” guy would have to make to be messaged as quickly as a poorer, taller 6’ guy.

The study is old, using data from just a few months in 2003, which is its first problem. The study measured clicks — who women messaged first on a dating site — not who they actually dated, moved in with, or married.

Digital clicks or likes are basically the cheapest signals in the dating market: they costs nothing and commit to nothing. Deciding who to message first is really just sorting a queue, and height is an easy thing to sort by — so even a woman who’d happily date the shorter guy might still open by messaging the tall one first.

So, yes, the study showed women like tall guys. (Surprise surprise.) But it didn’t show they ended up with tall guys in the end. (Or that the tall guys messaged them back).

As a result, the $30,000 figure is also an extrapolation, a line drawn well past the data underneath it. It doesn’t measure relationships, casual hookups, or even conversations. It simply measured the first click on a now antiquated dating site, which used email to communicate, in two American cities. As a result, as a price on real relationships, $30,000 an inch is almost certainly too high.

So, 30k was kind of a fake number. But I think there’s evidence it’s actually becoming real. The reason? Apps like Tinder.

In an online-dating-heavy world, male height really is becoming more and more valuable. I’d even call it an appreciating asset.

We made a dating calculator in collaboration with The Studies Show. Check it out at datingnetworth.com or read The Studies Show’s article about it.

Why is the $30,000 per inch figure increasingly plausible?

A generation ago, you met people through work, friends, parties, neighborhoods, church groups. Height was not a totally disqualifying attribute there. It was observed next to a face, a voice, a real person with their own unique story. In this world, charisma and personality could win. In the 1990s, you could not filter a dinner party for “5’10” and up.”

But everything has changed now. Most courtship moved online — by the late 2010s, apps had become the single most common way couples in the US meet — and online dating did something the old world never did. It made being short a filterable offense.

You can open an app and exclude every single person who isn’t a certain height, age, or location — and, controversially, in some cases, ethnicity or religion.

The problem for shorter guys is that, at the party or the coffee shop, their personality or charm (or money) might override their height disadvantage. But if a woman has excluded everyone below 5’10” on the app and you’re 5’7”, and you don’t lie, I don’t really know what to tell you. That’s genuinely tough, and a bit unfair — it’s a real cost imposed before you ever get to be a person to her. That’s where that inch isn’t worth $10k or $20k. On an app the value of that inch is effectively infinite, because it’s a hard requirement. That’s tough.

I’d argue the $30,000 figure probably wasn’t right when that famous study came out — back then, height mostly decided who got messaged first, not who got rejected. But it’s getting to being accurate closer now.

In an Unusual Assets sense: Dating apps made the price of male height go up, because the marketplace got a filter, which was actually a kill switch.

But it’s not hopeless, precisely because male height is an unusual asset.

Male height is an asset valued relative to the counterparty. A 5’7” man meeting a 6’ tall woman and a 5’ tall woman might get a totally different evaluation.

That’s because most women aren’t shopping for absolute height; they’re shopping for taller than they are — and in real couples the man is taller something like 92% of the time, far more than chance. (Which also shows it’s not a dealbreaker for everyone).

While we can be pretty confident women care about height, I doubt most 5’3” women rule out every 5’10” man because he’s not at the mythical 6’ barrier.

Alternative ways of valuing male height

Still, male height matters enough that some men undergo grueling, gruesome surgery to buy a little of it. Surgeons break the leg bones — the femur, the tibia, or both — bolt on a stretching device, and pull the bone apart by about a millimeter a day for months, so it heals back longer and the body ends up artificially taller. Most patients gain two or three inches. It costs anywhere from roughly $75,000 to well over $150,000 (cheaper abroad), it’s overwhelmingly men who do it, and there’s now a Hulu documentary on the industry called Short Kings.

But notice the price. Call it $100,000 for three inches and you get about $33,000 an inch — eerily close to the dating study’s $30,000. The made-up shadow price and the real surgical sticker price have basically converged. When a number we invented and a market people actually pay into agree this closely, the asset is at least being priced consistently — even if both prices are a little insane.

(In a world where makeup and appearance surgery seems to be something women feel pressure to do, this surgery is an interesting counterpoint.)

Fun fact: Rivers Cuomo of Weezer got a version of this — but in one leg, and not for height. He was born with his left leg about 1¾ inches shorter than his right, so surgeons broke his femur and he stretched it daily with a screw-driven brace, an ordeal he compared to crucifying his leg. (Insurance called it cosmetic and refused to cover it, so he paid the roughly $50,000 himself, out of Blue Album money.)

Isolated and in pain, he wrote Pinkerton, which many see as a precursor to the emo movement. (Weezer fan side note… perhaps the best song from that time period was a demo never officially released until recently.) There’s even an X-ray of his braced leg tucked inside the artwork for “The Good Life.”

Lionel Messi also had height intervention via medical means, but he had a real disorder as a child and would’ve ended up under 5’ in height without HGH. With HGH he ended up being 5’7 and one of the best soccer players of all time.

Long story short, your market pool doesn’t depend on your height in a vacuum. It depends on where you sit next to her. (If you’re doing straight dating, which is what this article covers). The same 5’8” man is comfortably tall to a 5’2” woman and below the line for a 5’9” one. Move down the distribution and the slice of women who’d count you as taller-than-them quietly shrinks; move up and it swells. The asset has no fixed price — only a spread that widens or narrows depending on who’s across the table.

Height helps men, but only up to a certain point

The other thing about male height is that its value depends heavily on where you sit in the distribution. Going from 5’5” to 5’10” is a huge move: you climb from roughly the 8th percentile of US men to about the 62nd. At 5’10” you’re taller than around 98% of women — though still shorter than about 38% of men. You’ve crossed the threshold where you’re taller than nearly all women, but you’re only middling among men. (For scale: only about 15% of US men are 6’0” or taller, so a woman who filters for 6’+ is fishing in a small pond.)

Going from 5’10” to 6’2” pushes you past all but the top 5% of men.

But you can see where this is going. The height premium doesn’t compound forever. At the top, height flips from asset to liability. Very tall men and very short women pair off far less than a “taller is always better” rule would predict. Past a point, another inch stops reading as masculine, protective, status and starts reading as too much — awkward in photos, a niche taste, a gap that’s more uncomfortable than reassuring. The desirability curve peaks somewhere in the low six feet and drifts back down. By the time you’re hitting 6’8”, you’re excluding a lot of short — and even average-height — women from your own pool.

That means height is probably somewhat negative in value past, say, 6’5 or so.

There is such a thing as too tall — which there decidedly is not for income.

So, is male height at $30,000 per inch overpriced or underpriced?

Financially, it’s overpriced. The study we started this post talking about looked at who women gravitate toward at first glance. But anyone who’s dated knows the person you super-like isn’t necessarily the person you walk down the aisle with. The other big problem is the sample: a lot of the women generating that figure were never going to date the 5’6” guy anyway. It’s a bit like asking a 5’7” woman who specifically wants someone taller what it would take to date a shorter man — you’ll get an enormous number, because you’ve asked the people most opposed to the trade. It’s hard to believe a 5’6” man can’t find a woman his height or shorter — at least if the filters don’t stop him first.

Culturally and structurally, the effect of male height is underpriced — because the filter is real, and getting filtered out is not the same as being someone’s second choice. The second choice can become the first choice with time. With an online filter, you’re not in the conversation at all. We took a fuzzy, forgiving, easily-overridden preference and hard-coded it into a checkbox you can switch a human being off with.

That’s the scary part.

So the two prices are these: the price to get that first click is rising — toward infinite behind a hard filter. The price to actually become someone’s partner is the one that’s overrated. The study measured the first; we keep quoting it as if it were the second.

So what’s an inch of male height really worth?

The truth is we don’t know. One questionable estimate we’ve just discussed puts it near $30,000 a year. Surgical estimates suggest it’s also near $30,000. I think the dating figure is wrong, but getting truer every year as dating apps quietly filter people by attribute.

This is a companion to The Studies Show’s writeup of our Dating Net Worth calculator. If you are interested in data and dating content, we also recommend following who writes .

Check out the calculator at DatingNetWorth.com

This post, like all Unusual Assets posts, is for entertainment and educational purposes only and is not financial, legal, or any kind of advice.

Jack Dorsey’s first tweet was not really his first tweet. It was his 20th, and the rest are lost to time. (We know this because Twitter’s internal Tweet counter lists it as #20, with every tweet following it proceeding sequentially upwards.)

That did not stop “@jack” from selling an NFT of this “first” tweet during the NFT craze. It sold for 2.9 million to a man to tried to resell it for $48 million, with the promise to donate $25 million of that to charity.

It is now worth less than $5 according to several viral online sources, which appear to cite failed auctions and/or a tracker on OpenSea. That pricing is basically wrong but not far off, because there are currently offers to buy it for more (though not much more).

This NFT goes viral every few months, mostly because people love to see rich people do stupid things, Twitter is famous, NFTs are mostly seen as dumb, and it’s a good story.

What’s it worth?

You can see the listing online at Opensea, and there are two current bids for it. The highest is for .012 Ethereum, which works out, right now, to be about $27 US Dollars. At an earlier auction, the highest bid was $6222, but the owner said he would probably never sell.

What’s the deal with NFTs?

While it seems a legitimately foolish purchase, and could just be written off as a cautionary tale, if you squint you can almost see how the NFT bubble came about.

The underlying idea was real: a way to prove ownership of a specific digital thing on a public ledger, portable across platforms, not dependent on any single company staying in business. That’s genuinely useful for tickets, credentials, deeds, in-game items, provenance for luxury goods — anywhere ownership matters and platforms can’t be trusted to outlive the asset.

In short, it was a way of trying to create scarcity in a digital world. A world where scarcity is not normal. You can copy a file 1,000,000 times and it will be exactly the same. A Picasso can’t be copied exactly, although some have tried.

But a Picasso can’t be copied for many reasons, including it’s age, the provenance, and the difficulty of painting something exactly the same. An art print is not the same as a painting, and a fake painting is very expensive to make and hard to sell. A fake digital file, on the other hand, is easy to make, free to spread, and is functionally the same for many people.

NFTs, in some ways, misunderstood some of what people care about when they buy items.

What’s so memorable, and unusual, about this NFT is that it has gone beyond a mere cautionary example of the NFT bubble. It’s a reminder of two historical moments that were both built on half-truths. The tweet was never actually the first tweet, and NFTs, as pitched in the early 2020s, were never likely going to be the financial investment they were promised to be.

Overvalued or undervalued?

At $27 this is clearly undervalued, both financially and culturally.

Financially, it is a curiosity which goes viral every few months or years, and when it does sell, at whatever price, the press alone will be worth something. What that number is I can’t say, but it’s a lot more than $27.

Culturally, it’s worth more than that as a reminder of the NFT craze and as a historical moment. Even just telling someone at a party you owned that would be worth more than $27.

This post, like all Unusual Assets posts, is for entertainment and educational purposes only and is not financial, legal, or any kind of advice.

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