My family has owned restaurants in the past and I would have to disagree with those statements.
You can take two different cooks, put them in identical kitchens with identical supplies, and they will come up with different things. You can even have them make the same thing (let's say chocolate cake) and there's no question that the two cakes will be different.
The ability and experience of the cook makes a huge difference.
Absolutely. But is there any good reason to believe that the "cook" of the more expensive e-
juice has more ability or experience? The very reason I took issue with the restaurant analogy is that I agree with your sentiment: a
Michelin-star chef is a vastly different beast from a fast-food cook. Reasonable people may disagree about whether world-class cuisine is overpriced, but at least there's no mystery as to why it costs several times more than mass-market food.
The chef's greater experience and training (training derived from hundreds of years of collective cooking experience) are but the tip of the iceberg. The ingredients are usually more expensive, too. The recipes are obviously more intricate and more skillfully executed. The service is more polished and extensive. And so on and so forth. The difference between Wendy's and a world-class restaurant is about as clear as you can get.
Compare that obvious dichotomy with the divide between expensive and lower priced e-juice vendors. Or better yet, don't even try, because it's a fruitless effort. Ultimately all we have as e-juice consumers are our own subjective preferences and whatever vague assurances the vendor proffers regarding the quality of his products' ingredients -- except that the cost difference between two tiny samples of food flavor, regardless of their relative quality, can't possibly account for a $10-20 difference in the price of a 30 mL bottle.
Not even remotely; flavoring ain't liquid gold. And since the e-juice industry is literally a handful of years old, there's no reasonable expectation that vendors' claims with regard to their superior mixology experience or flavor profiling skill have any validity.
Now, does any of the above mean that expensive juices are objectively overpriced? No, of course not. Vendors are entitled to charge whatever they like, and consumers are free to decide whether those prices are reasonable. I'd just caution the newbies out there not to assume that you'll get what you pay for in the e-juice market. It's not necessarily true -- arguably less true in the newborn e-juice market than in any other context. A vaper's tastebuds have countless disappointments awaiting them at every price point.
