Not just greeting cards but also gift wrap, bows and other related stuff is crazy expensive. A roll of perhaps ten feet of gift wrap costs three or four dollars, and a bow is a couple of bucks. I give gifts rarely enough that for the birthday of one friend’s child, I bought a toy and then spent upwards of ten bucks on a card, wrap and the other stuff. And then I had the rest of a roll of Thomas the Tank Engine wrap sitting in my closet for years after. I started to seek out smaller independent toy stores that offered gift wrap service. (Even if they charged a couple of bucks for the service, I’m still coming out ahead.)
We wrap presents fairly often. I bought some large rolls of giftwrap from one of the companies that sell it to those independent toy stores. I have one suitable for baby showers and small children, a coupe suitable for Christmas and Chanukah, and a couple that are “neutral”. (one of the neutral ones has large frogs on it, and is fun and suitable for most “kid things”.) That was about 5 years ago, and I’m good for several more years.
I’ve been buying from Zenni and they’re cheap enough to warrant buying multiple pairs on a whim for looks/moods/comfort versus buying one $500 pair and treasuring it. All you really need is a prescription and your pupilary distance which you can potentially get from your eye doctor while you’re there or else figure out on your own. I have a pretty regular prescription and an average-shaped/sized noggin though so YMMV.
Glasses at the mall or eye doctor is a straight-up racket. Glasses at Costco can be okay though not as cheap as online.
I find dollar store gift wrap to be very cheap compared to “name” brands: rips easily and is practically see through. I tend to use dollar store gift bags for birthday gifts and stock up on Dec 26th wrapping paper at 80% off for next Christmas.
There’s an ice cream shop near us that makes some pretty killer product. They also get $16/quart for it, which seems pretty excessive for what is essentially cream and sugar.
Headphones. It used to be you could buy a cheap pair for five dollars or less. A high end pair would be twenty or thirty dollars.
Then Dr. Dre took a break from slapping women and started up a headphone company. And his headphones cost over a hundred dollars. There was no significant breakthrough in the technology. People were just paying a huge markup for the celebrity imprint.
I figured it didn’t affect me. If suckers wanted to be conned, they could go ahead. I would just keep buying regular headphones.
But other companies saw the outrageous price that people were willing to pay for headphones and everyone raised their prices. Now you have a hard time finding a pair of headphones under fifty dollars.
I just now went on Amazon and searched for headphones. The first four products that came up (all with four-and-a-half star average customer ratings) were priced at $22.97, $13.99, $799.00, and $271.77. A little further down I see some Sonys (one of the supposed “Best Overall” picks) for $9.99. Headphone prices are all over the place, and many of them certainly cost way more than they should, but there are still cheap ones out there.
Wall paint sold by the quart. I am painting my laundry room to match the also recently painted kitchen which is the adjoining room, and I’m not sure that I will have quite enough paint. If I buy 2 quarts it costs $2 more than buying a gallon.
I can understand it being somewhat more expensive to buy by the quart, but more than twice as expensive?
I noticed this when I was a kid. At that time Testor’s model paint cost 25¢/quarter ounce. I did the math and was outraged that they were charging $128/gallon (at the time, enamel paint was maybe $10/gallon).
Which is, of course, made more difficult by the printers’ refusal to give an accurate account of how much ink you have left. Install new cartridges, print off three pages, and it says “low ink” again.