Bizarre as it sounds, the town I referenced used to have a sort of festival once a year that celebrated the humble fermented cabbage. I wouldn't say they embraced the stench itself, but in the spirit of the old-time farmer standing in his noisome barnyard, they collectively shrugged their shoulders and observed that it was the smell of money.
The little burg I (mostly) grew up in had a sizable contingent of both Norwegians and Swedes, inheritors of an odd sort of unspoken apartheid that a non-scandinavian like myself found both incomprehensible and funny. I couldn't tell a dime's worth of difference between them, but woe be unto anyone who got them mixed them up back in those days. How Lutefisk X was any less repellent than Lutefisk Y escapes me, but there were some fine points in the food arguments of of those days. If someone had gotten the bright idea of sauerkraut and lutefisk suppers, they'd have been responsible for olfactory misery beyond endurance.
(During and after.)
Mr. niteowl77
There is a town in the NC mountains with a large paper mill that is an olfactory assault, Canton. People from Canton would shrug and as you say, respond “smells like money.”
The odor entered into local weather lore, and it was hilariously accurate. If you saw people rushing to the grocery in winter despite no forecast of snow or ice, it’s because they could smell Canton in Waynesville. It always snowed when that happened. May still.