“What Made You Realize ‘Wait, This Whole Industry Is A Rip-Off’?” (30 People Answer)

Finding out who sponsored "influencers." The largest sponsors of "clean Tok" are cleaning manufacturers. Those makeup videos? Sponsored by makeup companies. All the "tradwife" and farm life videos? Sponsored by far right media groups. It's ALL a scam. All of them are being paid behind the scenes to push certain goods or a certain lifestyle. TikTok is literally just watching short commercials with less transparency.

The big scam: religion

A tax-free industry gets people to believe that happiness, health and economic prosperity truly depends on the frequency of attendance and the extent of donations ,

The Catholic Church used fear and indulgences to extrude wealth from hapless participants.

Modern religion uses HOPE as the way to bleed congregations and keep any abbherant thinking in check.

Gotta accrue those golden nails for your heavenly ✨️ mansion.

Worked a month as a pharmacy clerk, health insurance price disparity is insane, especially on things like insulin.

SocraticIgnoramus:

This is also why you can’t ever get a straight answer in medicine regarding how much a given procedure costs. Everyone’s got these contracts with wildly different prices, but they know that can’t say “$5,280 with Cigna, or $37 with Medicaid” so they give all kinds of non answers.
The American healthcare system’s lack of a transparent fee schedule should literally be against the law.

Software as a Service models. No one needs or wants their software to update and change formats every few months. We all just want a stable software that we can learn to use for a few years before a major performance upgrade. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t still be using Microsoft Word Millennium edition.

TICKETMASTER IS TICKETBASTARD.

Furniture. My wife is a huge fan of home design shows especially one called Dream Home Makeover. That'll be important later.

So anyways, one day she picks out a rug for our dining area. It's called The Janettte (yes, they name rugs) and we order it. It's something like $1500. When the rug arrives it has a label on the back that says The Samuel. I'm thinking we ordered the wrong thing so I Google the brand and "The Samuel". I find it on Wayfair for $300. This can't possibly be the same rug can it? I take a chance and order it from Wayfair and when I have both in my possession I do a side by side. The EXACT same rug. Basically, these designer brands are buying stuff directly from vendors, changing the name, and charging 5x the price.

Fast forward a few months. She finds a dining table on Studio McGees website (the folks who have the Dream Makeover show). I do a Google reverse search on the picture of the table and find it on a random furniture store's website for 1/3 of the cost.

Now I know these "designers" are nothing but glorified resellers.

The funeral industry.

You dont need a $5000 box to put a dead person in.

The whole stuff they do with dead people is weird and creepy and intended to suck as much money out of the family as possible.

I worked one day for some environmental fund raising b******t. We basically went door to door and begged for donations. We got 25% of all donations given, so if someone donated 100 bucks, 25 went straight to our pocket. They told us that people would ask how much went to the actual cause, we were instructed to say 91 or 92%. Some quick math there tells me they are telling us to lie.

They also targeted "white, liberal suburbia" because they said they were the most gullible, and from what I can tell their charity name changed often.

Don't donate to unreputable charities.

The “service fees” scam.
You see a price, think you’re getting a deal, and then—BAM!—at checkout, a bunch of mysterious fees appear out of nowhere. Concert tickets? "Processing fee." Ordering food? "Convenience fee." Even some hotels now have "resort fees" for things like using the pool (which you didn’t even touch). It’s like companies sat down and said, “How can we charge people more without actually raising prices?” And we all just… accept it.

Pure daylight robbery.

Weddings. Everything about a wedding is incredibly overpriced and so far booked out for no real reason.

Once upon a time, I attended a time-share presentation because they offered money to go. Yes, they are all high-pressure sales and scammy by nature, but on this one I spotted exactly how they were going to hose everyone involved.

I read the contract carefully (since I was there anyway and it made their salesperson shut up while I read), and quietly buried near the bottom was a mandatory cleaning and maintenance fee about half the rent of a modest apartment at the time that could be adjusted by them, at any time, with no stated limits.

Fortunately, they'd supplied a shuttle to pick up people and take them to the timeshare presentation location. There were about 15 of us in one of those little shuttle vans with seats that face each other. We started chatting on the way back, and I pointed the clause out to everyone in the group.

When I saw my first crypto rug pull. That's when I realized that most of the industry is a giant casino and it's all about who can time when to get out of the coin the best. Very few coins offer any real utility and no one's using most of them for anything legitimate. Most of it is just to move money across borders without the banks and governments seeing it.

Most glasses, esp ones you can get at an eye doctor.. one can get frames & lenses online for like $30. There's a big monopoly company that jacks up the prices in most brick and mortar stores.

Companies posting that they are hiring but in reality the jobs were only posted as a way to show company is growing. I believe it’s a way to manipulate their stocks. Fake job listings make it so much harder to find actual real jobs.

I had pet insurance for my dog for about 7 years. Every single thing that went wrong with him wasn't covered. Teeth, heart problems...nothing. Ended up putting the money into savings instead.

Women's magazines. You literally invent the problem ("we see your saggy arms, honey!") and sell the "solution" in the ad on the next page.

Aromatherapy. Marketing perfumed chemicals being pumped into your home as healthy and therapeutic.

Sector of the chemical industry that has no obligations to test products for long-term exposure/harm. Have funded fake "research" saying breathing chemicals is beneficial - better than breathing clean air. Then created multilevel marketing schemes to induce stay-at-home housewives to sell to each other.

Straight out of Idiocracy.

I’ve seen it pop up a couple times this week, but BlossomUp is a scam. If you pay to take any IQ test, especially online, the last thing you should be worrying about is how high your IQ might be.

Bottled water. I am old and remember when people were like, what?? Like water from the sink? In a throwaway bottle? My mom would buy the giant jugs w/ the spout from the grocery store and keep them in the fridge. That seemed less whacky. But she herself was a little whacked out, and was convinced that the water was poisoning us. I live in the midwest, so she was probably actually right. But now companies siphon off municipal tap water and sell it back to us in plastic bottles that end up littering the whole damn world.

Designer clothes, or designer anything really.

Many people spend so much money on name brands and all that stuff. I literally stopped buying special clothes since recently.

If I want special clothes, I have them custom made from a tailor and its WAAAAY cheaper.