Car dealerships.
Block chain - there’s still no legitimate practical use for it
In 2021 I would have said Crypto. Now everyone but the most dense people see it for the scam it is.
Car rental - I’m 95% sure I don’t need any of those extra insurances but due to pressure and fear tactics (you do want to be covered if x happens, right?), it’s hard to know in the moment.
Health insurance. Actually that probably doesn’t really count since most of us know it’s a scam.
College. The learning is fine, the cost is freaking out of hand. I never went and have no regrets. My daughter is going now and I feel like I’m supporting a scam.
Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.
Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don’t have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn’t covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.
Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can’t negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.
Paying for airplane luggage
Workplace benefits.
Really? What’s the benefit? You’re taking money out of my paycheck to restrict my choices?
And aren’t you a business anyway–you know, an organization whose purpose is to MAKE MONEY, not coddle people.
Capitalism
Subscriptions.
People pay every month but most don’t use the sub to it’s full value, and forget how expensive it becomes over the years. And you don’t own anything on a subscription, you just borrow it.
Also trial periods that prolong automatically into subscriptions.
“Disposable” electronics
Individualism
DLCs: Games are expected to have DLCs nowadays, so game devs purposefully hold back some ideas for potential DLCs, often crippling the main game as a result.
Subscription services: For pretty much anything, but especially those automated monthly payments, which you won’t bother cancelling, even if you feel like you’re not using the service to its fullest.
Airline ticket prices.
