A question of standards

Upon my recent discussions with friends, dates and former boyfriends I discovered something striking. It seems that there appears to be a pattern of lowering one's standards in a directly opposite relation to one's success. Case in point: a successful bank manager, who has a law school degree, is personable, attractive, witty and overall an awesome catch described me the following when I inquired as to his ideal partner: 

" I want someone who is employed, not crazy and does not bring bologna on the first date."

Of course I though he was joking, but he apparently was not. When I prodded about the rest of his 'list' he just looked at me and said there was nothing else to add. Then he proceeded to tell me the story of an 'exciting' first date wherein the guy was supposed to meet him at a restaurant but instead bumped into him at the bologna counter at a nearby grocery store. Apparently, the lure of said bologna was too much to wait until after the date to purchase.

On the other hand, I have also seen multiple examples of people who are barely employed in fields that do not offer stellar job growth or advancement opportunities who seem to have a list a mile long and would absolutely refuse to date anyone who doesn't drive a late-model year luxury car and have money to spend and then some. So this begs the question: what is going on??

I find the above developments very disconcerting as it already takes the tiny pool of actually date-able upstanding quality men and decreases it further by making them so pessimistic and down-trodden through recurrent bad experiences that they have no choice but give up as illustrated in the case above. Or they go the other extreme and throw up a list of qualifications that pretty much disqualifies anyone who is not their identical twin from ever making it past the first few dates. Surely, we can [and should] do better! Not that elevating your standards works any better [just ask me!] but there definitely needs to be a happy medium. And if all else fails, then at least have a 'no lunch meat' date policy laid out ahead of time.