I thought we had a thread on this but the one I was thinking of was the opposite - basically great deals.
OK, here we go: dog treats!
Why should bull pizzle (penis) cost $6? It has no use outside of being a dog treat (as I cluelessly eat a hot dog) and would normally just be thrown away or sold along with the rest of the cow’s useless parts to a dog food company. Same with pig ears. What demand is there for pig ears outside of giving your dog a high-fat treat? Antler bone. Cow hooves. All of the waste products sell for big money and it can’t be supply and demand because there just ain’t no demand for it outside of an occasional treat for Fido & Rover.
And i regret clicking on that link. Making a walking stick with the handle made of bull penis sounds incredible disgusting. Let’s just fetishize this large penis and hold a piece of dead meat when we walk.
OMG yes!!!
I pay monthly premiums and then copays and then a percent of the over-priced treatment that I don’t know the price of before it occurs. At best it is nebulous and at worse it is un-informed consent (sometimes under duress) and it has been repeatedly shown that their charges bare no relationship to their actual cost. I think health insurance is the only insurance that charges you multiple times for the same thing. I don’t count car insurance deductibles because 1) it is a fixed cost that does not inflate based on the insurance company’s cost and 2) I can choose to have auto insurance with no deductable.
A few weeks ago I bought one of those little strainers you put in the bathroom sink and it cost $5 and change. Didn’t think much about it at the time, but later I thought, jeez something like that should cost maybe 59 cents.
Chicken wings. I blame you all for making me pay too much for chicken wings.
Back when life was worth living, chicken wings cost nothing. Grocery stores used to pay you to take them off their hands. I liked chicken wings since before I was born, so this was good.
But then the infamous Buffalo Wing Fad hit the world like a giant chicken egg splattering on a wall and you all had to get your grubby little hands on the body part of the chicken you used to shun. The part I always cherished. The notorious chicken wing.
The demand for chicken wings skyrocketed. Well guess what happened when the demand for chicken wings skyrocketed? [awaits answer] No, it has nothing to do with Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Correct answer: the price of chicken wings skyrocketed too!
Now I have to take out a mortgage every time I buy a pack of chicken wings at the grocery store. Who’s to blame for this fiasco? You!
When I say “you”, I don’t mean you in the general way. I mean you specifically. Stop eating so many chicken wings!
It’s the same with bacon. Bacon is $8 a pound now! Sometimes I find a no-name package for less.
On the other hand, pork doesn’t cost very much because there is so much left over after the bacon is cut away. And chicken is relatively cheap (or was) for the same reason. (edit: I know there are other factors involved besides ‘lots of leftover meat’)
I’m looking at putting Paint Protection Film on my new Bronco. It’s basically just clear adhesive vinyl, like the stuff that signs are made from. It tends to be expensive to have applied, because it’s labor intensive, and requires some skill. So, I found a company selling pre-cut sheets for the doors - for $750 dollars! That’s just a total rip-off. The material is maybe $50 at the most.
At my work, we have a plan with a deductible of $3500.
I hate when I have to explain to someone (usually young, usually their first time having their own health insurance) that the real benefits of having insurance don’t kick in until you’ve spent $3500. If they’re already paying, say, $100/mo for their portion of the premium, that means that they have to spend $4700, in a single year, before they’re just paying copays.
You can see the disappointment on their face when they realize that after giving it a lot of thought and deciding that getting health insurance is the right/adult thing to do, in reality, short of a catastrophic medical event or something chronic, it means they just have $100 less per month.
The name brand stuff, yeah. But if you can get a knock-off cartridge, those IME, work just as well. I feel like Monoprice really disrupted the market and now you can just grab them from Amazon for a fraction of the price. I go through 2 or 3 toner cartridges per year. The knock-offs are $15, the HP branded ones are $200.
If I’m saving enough on toner in a year to replace the printer if something went wrong (like spewing toner all over the inside of the printer).
Except most printers now use DRM for their cartridges so that, even if the knock-off one would work just as well, the printer just plain refuses to work if you try to use one.
And speaking of health insurance, a lot of medications are way overpriced. How much does it cost to make an epinephrine autoinjector? And yet, they charge hundreds of times that much, because people will die if they don’t get them.
So buy a sheet of it for $50 and cut it yourself. I suspect you’ll find a good chunk of that extra $700 was spent on a CNC cutter and the labor involved in creating the pattern.
As an aside, I have to assume it’s difficult for someone with no actual training to wrap their car well. Like when I see tinted windows that are completely full of bubbles and think to myself ‘that’s why you don’t tint your own windows’.
Yeah, that’s why I said “if you can get”, since I know they don’t always work these days. I’ve seen some potential tricks to make them work, but as of now, it’s not an issue for me so I haven’t dug into it too far.
And then add to that, the cost of everyone else involved between the manufacturer and you, each bumping the price even more.
Over the years I’ve done GoodRX, Bid RX, pharmacy shopping etc. Sometimes I can save a good amount of money, sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth. My insurance just renewed and to get everything at the same pharmacy would cost about $100+ more per month. Now I’ve got scripts at Walmart, Walgreens, OptumRX (UHC) and CostPlusDrugs (Mark Cuban), just to keep the costs about the same as they were before.
You also get access to whatever rate the insurance company has negotiated for the procedure, which can be 10% of the standard rate. Now, you could maybe get that rate, if you call and negotiate and beg, but maybe not. Like, before I meet mt deductible, a routine office visit is $90 for me. Insurance decided they didn’t cover that visit, and it was retroactively $330, even though either way, i was paying all of it.
Truly, the whole kluge of a system is so complicated that its practically impossible to even understand, when you are starting out.
Health insurance is like most insurance. You are almost certainly going to lose money on the deal, but you need it in case something catastrophic happens. In the US after the ACA reforms, what you might pay out of pocket in a year is capped. On some insurance plans, you pay for everything until you hit that cap, but you pay a low premium and nothing more if you were to ever hit that cap.
Health insurance getting you access to better prices on things is also very helpful, and is probably the main portion of their utility for most people, though it’s probably not going to save you the entire cost of your insurance unless someone else is helping you pay for it (employer, ACA subsidies). The main point of the insurance is the catastrophic coverage, and getting better rates for the routing services you do use is just a nice bonus.
My problem here would be that anytime I need to buy ink, it ends up being a last-minute thing, and I end up just making a mad dash to Staples and grabbing something there, being glad I’m catching them during business hours.
If I were to give it more thought, I’d do some shopping around at a non-urgent time so I would know where to get something at a more reasonable price, or maybe even stock up a little bit. But I rarely have to print stuff (fortunately), and the only time I think about extortionate prices is when I’m standing there at the cash register. And also, when someone someone on a message board starts a thread about overpriced merchandise.
Most of this is just pure economics. Sellers are going to sell something for the maximum amount of profit they can even if it sucks for us.
Like printer ink which I came in here to mention.
Take small electronics. Prior to Covid and the chip thing making cell phones and radar detectors cost chump change. They’re laughing at people who pay $700 for an Escort Redline, but they’re laughing all the way to the bank.
