My girlfriend ordered some business cards from an online company a few months ago. They were given as a sample and cost very little, so she didn’t mind that they sucked. Until a few months later, when she found they had signed her up for a membership without telling her and were charging her about $15 a month for that privilege.
I agree.
I have Comcast, and have had them for years. Yes, I have had complaints. But they are hardly a “Businesses who mostly make money by tricking people and adding hidden fees”. Comcast can be reasoned with, if you try a few times. I have dealt with *far *worse.
I would no more drive a U-Haul truck than I would construct one myself out of popsicle sticks. They’re maintained in a way that would land their corporate masters in prison if it was a fleet of commercial trucks.
There’s really two divisions of common business scammers:
- Hidden fee people, who advertise fees that bear no relation to reality and aggressively avoid telling you what the actual price is.
Cell phone and cable providers have been mentioned already, but let me also add the gas and electric people. The Onion had an article once called something like “Gas Bill Apparently Designed By Some Kind of Freaking Maniac,” and the thing is, it perfectly described my gas bill. In fact, the picture of a gas bill ion the article looked just like my gas bill. My advanced macroeconomics texts weren’t as confusing as my gas bill. The electricity bill is also a baffling labyrinth of sanity-threatening bafflegab that combines charges, subcharges, surcharges, fee, levies, usage graphs, debt retirement fees, levelling adjustments, Venn diagrams, Fermat’s Theorem and the episode guide to “Battlestar Galactica” in a spaghetti-logic web of lies and treachery, all coming out to a figure that invariably is within five dollars of last month’s fee, and never goes down overall no matter what I try to do to save power.
- The Lying Salesman, who uses lies to get you to buy something for more than it’s worth. Car salesmen are infamous for this, but the ones I enjoy the most are fitness club salespeople.
We’ve moved every two years, so we always end up going to another fitness club, and it’s always the same routine; there are no prices posted anywhere. You may have a flyer promising some low rate, but either that sale has magically ended or the additional fees make it a terrible deal. You’re ushered into a small room and the salesperson starts drawing numbers on a peice of paper that kind of looks like scrap paper but it’s not. He always starts out writing down some utterly ludicrous numbers, then crossing them out. “Okay, so there’s a fifty zillion dollar signup fee, and then it’s eleventy jillion dollars a month.” He then crosses those figures out and says “But this month only we can give you a deal on that. So no signup fee, and it’ll be a grillion dollars a month, or else if you sign up for two years it’s just a frillion.”
He’ll then stop talking, to see if you are an idiot with more money than brains and take the bait. If you lean out the door you will probably notice that most of the exercise machines and weights are not being used.
If the silence is long enough then he trots out the Special One Time Only Deal Thing That Will Vanish In Two Days. He offers a semi-reasonable rate, like $50 a month (what constitutes reasonable depends where you are and what kind of club it is) but assures you that unless you act right now this rate will vanish, like Cinderella’s coach, and if you come back next week there will be no memberships available in the two-thirds-empty club except ones so expensive you will have to consult a mortgage company.
If you hold on a little longer, or say “Too much. Give me your best price now,” there will be the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and then the confusing deals are offered where there are seventeen different ways of paying and you get 15 months for the price of 12 and blah blah blah, and if you just keep saying “No, no, no” or “Well, we’ll think about it” eventually you get down to the real price, which is about a third of the first bogus price.
If I had some startup capital I’d start a gyum call Rick’s No Bullshit Priced Gym, and up front there would be a big sign that said “MEMBERSHIPS ARE FORTY BUCKS A MONTH. IF YOU WANT PERSONAL COACHING IT’S SIXTY BUCKS AN HOUR. NO EXCEPTIONS, NO SALES, NO DEALS, NO BULLSHIT.” I bet I’d have the place packed in four days.
I had to deal with these Reservation Rewards fuckers. I bought something on half.com mumble years ago, and somehow these assholes thought it would be ok to start charging me 9 dollars a month for God knows what. They managed to sneak it passed me for a while because I thought the charge was a recurring magazine subscription due to the lack of identifying information. I was shocked that they willingly refunded all of my money, but still! If any of us tried to pull a stunt like that we’d be tossed into jail for theft, even if we gave the money back when caught.
Load of crap if you ask me.
And on about day seven you’d be visited by three or four very ripped gentlemen dressed entirely in black. After you’re able to return to work, all new customers will pay the customary annual fee.
You want to talk about scams, talk to someone who owns a small business. We get the calls for ‘supplies’ all the time. A few months ago someone called from the America Yellow Pages*, to verify our listing. (I have to admit I just heard Yellow Pages). They went over the name of the business, web address, physical address, phone number etc etc etc. I answered yes to everything. Then she said “Okay, we’ll go ahead and renew your subscription and you’ll have your new book in a week.” WAIT STOP BACK UP, “Wait, where are you calling from?”
“America Yellow Pages”
“And how much is this subscription going to cost?”
“$740”
“CANCEL EVERYTHING, DON’T SEND ME ANYTHING, I’M NOT SUBSCRIBING TO ANYTHING”
and I hung up.
I did some reseach, and yup, they’ve scammed alot of companies.
I reported them to the BBB and the attorney gen in their state and mine.
They called me back a few days later and asked why I reported them to the BBB. I explained that they tried to trick me into ‘renewing’ something that I had never subscribed to in the first place, and if any random employee had answered the phone we would have gotten a $740 phone book in the mail. She tried to tell me it wasn’t a scam. I told her what I read on the internet and she said that she is aware of what the internet says about her company. I asked her how she can go online, read the BBB complaints against her, read the ripoffreport against her and read countless blogs talking about her, and then tell me that it’s not a scam when they did they tried to do the same thing to me that they did to all these other people. She said she would make sure nothing was sent to us and that if we got anything from them via UPS or fedex to refuse it. I told her, I would send it back if I saw it get dropped off, but otherwise it goes in the garbage. I also told her that if I receive a bill for anything (whether or not I got the product), the bill would be sent to the FTC and they should not expect payment from me. And when she had the nerve to ask, I told her I would refuse to call off the BBB, my complaint still stands, even though they weren’t successful, they still attempted to scam me.
*I don’t think that’s the exact name, but it’s something similar to that.
Wells Fargo
free credit report dot com
It’s no Annual Credit Report.com - Home Page
They sign you up for some credit monitoring service. I know that this is low-level as far as threats or scams go for internet savvy people, but for others “freecreditreportdotcom” seems to offer the mandatory annual credit report that www.annualcreditreport.com gives you.
The free, legit site doesn’t advertise, the leech site choses a similar URL
I think that this level of deception is the worst, where would you go to fix an issue?
Doc and dealer prep fees.
And the insurance is a rip-off itself in a lot of cases. Most people that have a car insured are also insured in rental cars. Well, at least I am, and I don’t have any kind of top shelf policy.
But the car rental places push that insurance like crazy. They have key words and what not to make you think you’re making a huge mistake by not taking the insurance. A friend of mine used to work for Enterprise and she claims the insurance is where the big money is.
A big truck might be a different story. I’m not sure if my insurance would cover me in a U-Haul.
I’m actually a member at a place very like this - small neighborhood place, thirty bucks a month, paid cash in advance, no contract deals or direct withdrawl cr*p. 
Don’t know if they offer personal coaching.
The only real issue I have with them is that there’s only two good treadmills. Showed up yesterday to get a workout in, and two twenty-ish guys were obviously just starting on them. I hate to wait for the treadmill, so I just headed right back out, walked home through the snow, and then went to the mall.
Satellite TV companies too.
I’m being billed for a phone jack on my DVR I don’t use. They told me I wouldn’t have to pay the fee if I got a second account. Reason being is because their 2-account systems are more technically advanced than their single-account systems and don’t need the phone jack. Whatever.
Ticketmaster.
One of the last times I tried to use them, it was for like a $70 ticket.
Then, they go “sales tax”.
OK.
Then, you go to the next page, and there’s a “handling fee”.
Well, OK.
Then, there’s a different charge if you want them emailed, mailed, or for pick-up at will call. Ther’s essentially no way to avoid this.
Anyway, I’m still clicking along. I’m in for about $85-$90 at this point, and I finally get to a final page that tells me they want a “convenience fee”.
Oh, FUCK. YOU.
Fuck me in the ass all you want, pricks, but at least have the decency not to call it a strawberry shortcake. Ticketmaster should be bombed to the ground. They are the lawyers and realtors of coorporations. They have skimmed so much shit out of an agreement that I just want to make with, say, the Baltimore Ravens. Hey Ravens, I’ll give you $75. You give me a seat. Why do we need this asshole to come along?
That’s fees.
But, regular monthly charges for things. . .satellite radio, iTunes subscriptions, those $3’s and $4’s that cable/phone/internet charge. . .they are the devil’s revenue. I do everything in my power to avoid them – I’m mostly quite capable of it.
If you get your tickets a few weeks in advance, it’s free to have them mailed. It’s the last option.
Except here, you have to rent the cable card, it’s not as much, but it’s still 2-3 bucks a month. Plus they have to come out and install it, which is a fee as well.
For years I’ve called them TicketBastards. I will go to great lengths of inconveinece to avoid using them.
I agree with most of these. And another complaint I have is automatic renewal that is opt-out. Automatic renewal should *always *be opt-in. And the opt-out should not be difficult to find.
You seem to have misspelled “they’re malevolent, toadying, vile, needle-dicked catamites who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.”
How about Amway/Quixtar? They trick people by initially getting them to buy their products, but switch to getting them to be a distributor. When they are working on you to become a distributor, they say it will take only “a couple hours per week” and say it will only cost the initial fee for their getting started package to get you on your way to financial success. They don’t tell you about the costs of the rallys you just have to go to or you won’t be successful, or the cost of books and tapes you just have to have in order to make your business successful. They won’t tell you about the countless hours you have to put into the system to get your financial independence.
I think it qualifies.