*VHS tapes. DVD sales are quickly catching up to the old champ, yet I can’t find an unused, new movie on tape for less that 16 bucks.
*Cars. I have a hard time justifying this, but they just cost too damn much to buy or own.
*CDs. Half the country just burns their own with whatever they want on them for pennies, and yet to go to a store and buy a regular CD with a label on costs 20 dollars.
Clothing for big and tall men. You can’t convince ME that it costs all that much more to add a little more material to lengthen shirttails, sleeves, and pant legs, or expand waists and collars to fit a larger man. I’ve looked for dress shirts for my hubby in those specialty shops and I just can’t BELIEVE the markup. Sometimes it’s more than twice the price of regular sized clothing!
Let’s not even get started on groceries–I got married in 1985 and $40 a week would run my pantry over. NOW I have trouble getting by on $100 per week. Of course there are two kids to feed now, but still, I cannot believe how prices have gone up these last few years!
As for contact lenses, I get new ones when they are offered at special rates–I can afford them then! Still, they are less expensive now than they were when I got my first pair at age 15 (in 1981). Those suckers were $200.00 and now I can usually get them for less than half that–even at regular prices. Be that as it may, I wear a pair till I get all the good out of them 'cause cheapER don’t mean cheap!!
I don’t like the high cost of the shoes I buy, but I can tell you that Payless shoes make my hard-to-fit feet miserable.
Please don’t get me started on the CD thing. I hate this gripe. They don’t cost “pennies” to make. Marketing, overhead, shipping, distribution, producing… all that costs money and has to be recouped somehow. Making a CD is not just churning out little discs of cheap material.
And I’m with you on the glasses, sort of. Only not really. When you think about something that you wear every single day of your life (in my case, anyway), spending $500 isn’t actually so outrageous. I mean, that’s less than $1 a day to see well if I keep my frames for two years. And I’m one of these people who would have to be issued a seeing-eye-dog if I didn’t have my glasses on my face.
But I will submit: Designer clothing. $800 for a pair of slacks? No, no, no. No. I’m sorry, but no.
A college education is entirely too expensive. However, this is coming from a privately educated spoiled rich kid who has just been tracked down by his student loan collection agent.
Munch - who wants to know how it’s possible to accrue $1900 of penalties in 6 days
I always thought that the following three items were insanely overpriced, given what it must cost to produce them:
Greeting cards
Wrapping paper
Contact lens saline solution
Updating my list, I guess that I’d have to add bottled water.
Vinnie, I have to take exception to one item on your list: Tires.
You can get them for about $25 a pop these days, right? Ever hold a a tire in your hands? There is a LOT of raw material and value-added there, my friend. Secondly, think of the performance you get out of those babies. They hold up hundreds of pounds of metal + passengers at 65 MPH over lord-knows-what roadbeds, all the while staying inflated with AIR. Tires do a shitty, thankless job – and they do it amazingly well. (Yeah, well, we all know about the Firestone thing.)
I think tires are remarkably durable, trustworthy and cost efficient. Given the quality of some other crap that costs more pound-for-pound, tires are one of the true bargains of our age.
Hey, OldMan, I can say that I am not here to offend anyone, or I am here to offend no one, but nevertheless, I am here and someone might get offended.
The real deal is, the man (man? Who can tell?) asked what we felt is too expensive. Therefore, noting the vast difference in my wife’s enormous CD collection and my own tiny one, I feel CDs are too expensive and she really doesn’t.
Computers. Every other electronic device is expensive when it first comes out and then the price drops. Computers always cost about $1000 and up. They should be down around $299 by now.
I figured it would probably be expensive, and I was thinking it could be as high as $AU1000, but I nearly died when all the local photographers quoted around the $AU2100 mark.
Tennis shoes, especially for kids. $40 for a pair of sneakers my son will outgrow in 3 months? I buy them on clearance at the end of the season, and a size bigger, instead.
I want a carpet steamer, but can’t justify the $300+ outlay for it.
Airline Tickets (sometimes): $900 round trip? I can only imagine what first class tickets must cost.
Movie Tickets: $8.50 here. Not worth it for most movies.
Hotel Services: $9.99 to watch a movie in my room? $12.99 to watch porn in my room? 19% service charge on Room Service, plus tax and gratuity, plus the food is overpriced to begin with…
Cover Charges at bars/clubs, especially strip clubs.
Have you tried to get a ticket for a good seat at a NBA game recently? How about a concert? I don’t go anymore.
Stuyguy, when I first got contacts I made my own saline solution. I figured out that it was costing me about 15 cents to make the equivalant volume that B&L was selling for about $3.00 then. Then they outlawed the sale of pure salt tablets. (I used to buy them from the drug store.) Now I buy the generic saline for about $1.50, which is still a pretty good mark-up.
And I hear ya’ on the big-n-tall clothing. I look for Clarence’s rack whenever I’m in that part of the store.
Decent wine. It’s gone up too much over the last several years. Yes, it’s better because of great growing conditions in California but did that cost the growers anything? Hell no.
Sending flowers or, heck, just buying an arrangement.
Luxury cars. I want one but I couldn’t enjoy it at 70K a pop.
Bottled water. You should be able to walk on it for the prices they charge.
Ties. I think I’ll just start weaving my chest hair instead.
Organic vegetables. You want me to pay more for something that’s been around a fly swatter?
Asparagus. For that price the Beano should come with it.
Yes, but can you honestly say that Marketing, overhead, shipping, etc costs MORE when you’re creating a CD than it does when you’re creating a cassette tape? And, judging by what I can see (I can buy blank CDs for much, much less than I can buy blank tapes for), CDs cost LESS to actually manufacture than tapes. Finally, they SELL more CDs than they do tapes, and mass-producing almost always makes it cheaper to make a single unit.
So why, in the blue hell, do CD’s cost 120% as much as tapes do?
