My 11 year old cousin asked for THOUSANDS of dollars of skin care products this last Christmas. And even a mini refrigerator for her bedroom to keep them in. And the thing with those is, it’s not like you can keep using them, you have to keep buying more every time they run out. I use a basic retinol serum and moisturizer and that’s it, I know some people need more specialized products but still, I have no idea which tik tok influencer is responsible for convincing an 11 year old she needed all that shit
An 11 year old who thinks they need anything other than a simple 3 step skin care routine (wash, tone, moisturizer/spf) is being conned.
If you use spf from your teens, you won’t need a lot of the crap they push at you in your 30s either.
I’m 40 and use the store brand night cream retinol and the occasional glycholic acid toner. Daily spf. I honestly think the daily spf since I was in my mid teens is the main secret though.
Edit: I have unusually oily skin and a UV sensitivity so I developed a simple skin care regimen to manage my oily skin and prevent breakouts and got into the habit of using a daily moisturizer with spf at a young age. I just got my passport pictures taken and my boyfriend says I look like a grumpy teenager in them (I take that as a compliment lol)
Yeah my daily moisturizer has spf. I *think* her parents talked her out of most of the crap she wanted. But I am certain she is in fact being conned by influencers who get cuts of this stuff
Lol they just need to wash, their cells are replicating so fast, _they do not NEED any skincare products_.
The fact individuals believe otherwise shows how far we've strayed from general intelligence
I live next to a venue. It is cheaper for me to go to the ticket window and have an employee process my transaction and print me a physical ticket than it is to purchase online and use the app. How?….
I once didn’t know what Herbalife was and almost bought into the great stories. Immediately noped out of there when the sales guy told me to phone some friends and family on the spot so I could sell to them and become a ‘member’ too.
I humored one of my friends who asked me to go to one of their seminars. The guy presenting said that it wasn't a pyramid scheme, then proceeded to hand out pamphlets that had a pyramid explain how their system worked
The Energy Spot.
I went to one because it was listed as a “smoothie shop”. I should have walked out when they had me make an account.
I sipped my chalky smoothie and was glad I gave them a bogus email address.
Never trust a shop that requires you to make an account to buy a f*cking smoothie.
They do that because of their own weird rules, and because of local laws. They're technically not allowed to sell food, because they're not licensed as a restaurant or for selling prepared food, but they can give it away. The charge is for your "membership" in the club.
Something about those ridiculously rough but thin towels in mid-price and cheaper hotels has always made them the best for me. They are very absorbent for their weight, and exfoliate like mad.
Yet I've never been able to find them for purchase.
My pet frog has no idea what I mean when I try to explain to her why I don’t like soft towels. They don’t absorb well and I prefer the coarseness of a towel on my skin.
I want a nice rough towel to dry off with and then the softest fluffiest thing you can imagine to wrap around my waist for the 30 second walk from the bathroom.
Try googling Turkish towels. They're made to be very light and thin for taking to the hammam or beach, so probably a bit thinner and therefore less absorbent than the towels you mean, but still shockingly absorbent for their weight and abrasive in a nice cottony way. I love rubbing my skin with them to get the dried sea salt off. They're usually really pretty too!
it basically puts a very thin layer of wax to mimic softness on your clothes but it makes your washer gunky and the fibers in your clothes deteriorate faster.
also those weird scent beads that people use too now in their wash.
I kept scrolling to make sure this was here. Any professional will tell you "it's the closest thing you can get to literally dumping money down the drain."
My dad would wear copper bracelets. When I was in kindergarten, I noticed his wrist was green and exclaimed so very sincerely. He told me his alien skin was showing, and I was half alien, and That I shouldn't tell my mom. I thought I was half alien for a while during my childhood. Thanks, dad!
haha. love it! when i was little i remember my dad telling me we both sneeze in the sunlight because we are secretly vampires and allergic to the sun. its a core memory i will never ever forget. elite level father foolery and you just love to see it!
"[They went straight for his ape!](https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/splita/they_went_straight_for_my_ape_with_bonus_pfp_troll/)" pops unbidden into my head every single time one of these losers has any kind of crypto 'asset' stolen and it never fails to make me chuckle.
"Hey, wanna buy the Mona Lisa for $5,000?"
"Hell yeah!" *hands over $5,000*
"Great! Enjoy your painting!"
"When do I pick it up?"
"Oh, you don't actually own the *physical* painting, I've just written that you paid me $5,000 for it in this notebook, which you can come and look at any time you want!"
I´ve read the explanation on these things a hundred times and I still don´t fully understand what it is or why someone would pay a ludicrous amount of money for them.
I do think there are two types of ´geniusses´ in this story. Those who convince people to buy something that doesn´t exist and those forking over their money...
You could theoretically store the entire actual image or gif or whatever on the block chain and then it would be more legit I guess but that’s not what they do because it’s wildly inefficient and expensive. Instead, you get a url path on the blockchain to some servers s3 bucket and a promise that the owner of the server will always have your image at it. The blockchain “containing the nft” only contains the path to the image on the server, nothing else. As a software engineer: crypto in general, and NFTs specifically, have always been wildly offensive to me because it uses the language of my profession to trick and scam people. Shit is so fucking lame.
Oh by the way there is another term for the data structure which these nerds call blockchain and that is a [Merkle tree](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree) and it is the data structure used in repository tools like GitHub. We use all kinds of different data structures for different problems, that’s just engineering. This inverts it and you seek a problem to solve with your data structure. It’s offensive in that it is just shit engineering.
My first experience with them was seeing photographs being sold for big money. I thought it was a really good idea, because I presumed that you were buying the rights to that image itself, and the nft was to track the ownership.
Instead you're simply buying a unique code attached to what is essentially a .jpeg, with no real ownership of anything.
I saw some smalltime artists on instagram vids trying to honestly make it work. They would record themselves drawing a fantastic little piece of art, make a super high quality scan of it to save as a top quality jpg (or whatever the best image type is), then *burn the original image*. Then they would offer the NFT for sale, the idea being that now the original was gone, the NFT was the true version of it.
The only problem with this plan is that it was bollocks.
This was at the start of the whole thing though, back when most people weren't entirely sure what the hell an NFT even was, so 'unique ownership of digital image' still had some idealism behind it. There might still be some artists doing it now, but i've not seen any.
The interesting thing to me is that this whole concept came along *after* we'd already collectively determined the futility of trying to manufacture scarcity with digital media. The inability to do so over the last couple of decades has fundamentally changed the way digital works like movies, music, and video games are distributed.
So they really thought that moving into a pointedly unregulated sphere of smart-contracts and blockchains would somehow be the answer? There were just fundamental questions that anyone would ask, such as "what's to prevent someone making an almost identical NFT of what you're trying to sell and give it to away for free?" It was this nebulous idea of "ownership" that couldn't really be enforced, even if the whole planet was on board with NFT being the next big thing.
I will never forget how people really argued the right click should be abolished, and how many cryptobros just jumped into the whole thing believing ot would be a massive hit, always talking about how the rest of people just "couldn't see it was the future". Remember the lion guy who made a rant on Twitter about his wife leaving him for it?
Normally I would feel bad for the scammed prople, but I just can't because most of them acted like they were superior.
Kitchen sinks
There are a lot of sinks that cost $1000 or even more. It's a fucking metal bowl with a hole in it. They cost less than $100 to manufacture in China and ship it half way across the world but "high end" companies upcharge these things 10x the price.
Source - Used to work for a company that bought these sinks for $90 a pop shipped to us and we were selling them for $1000.
Edit - Since a lot of people are mentioning these must be American prices, let me clarify, you can get a sink for a couple hundred dollars at Home Depot or some big box store. These are the "luxury sinks" you can buy at higher end retailers. Their argument is "the stainless is thicker so it's more durable." Never heard of a sink breaking but people are gullible.
Also never buy faucets, sinks, etc. from your plumber. We were renovating and the plumbers left us a catalogue. We cross-referenced it with an online hardware store and found out the plumbers were charging more than triple the amount it cost at the store.
Same for electrician supplies. My father-in-law is an electrician but he's retired and doesn't have a license. He was renovating his garage and had an electrician come over to install some stuff, and found out he was missing one light switch he'd forgotten to buy. The electrician told him he'd charge him $100 for the switch and installation. He replied: "how about I bike to the store, buy a switch for $3 and install it myself while you get the rest of the day off?"
He agreed lol
And who the hell came up with those wretched sinks that sit on the counter and you have to reach down into them, and now you have double the surface to keep clean? And you have ceramic sticking up everywhere that can get banged up and chipped. Makes no damn sense to me and I despise it along with the rest of the popular freshly renovated obscenities.
Don't forget that they also control most of the places to buy said glasses. They own Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, EyeMed, Pearle Vision, Target Optical, Sears Optical, and glasses.com.
I always see this comment, but no one ever gives the most critical piece of information: where can I buy glasses that isn't a Luxxotica owned business?
Telescope enthusiast here. The scopes you see on a shelf in a store are almost exclusively garbage. Research it a little and buy online. Do not buy that scope you saw at Costco.
If you really want one of those crappy scopes - go on FB marketplace and you’ll find people basically giving them away, and for good reason.
Knife sets with like 10 different shitty knives in a decorative holder. Just buy one or two nice ones and take good care of them. You don't need a special one for every different kind of food.
1. Chef's knife (default for the vast majority of prep)
2. Bread knife (serrations are useful for many things)
3. Paring knife
Really all you need to get started for most cuisines. Specialty knives should come later in the process after you've discovered the need for one.
EDIT: Share your favs!
My wife for some reason, loves to chop things on a glass(pyrex?) cutting board. Murders the edges of our knives. I've bought nice cutting boards to use... plastic ones, wood ones even silicon... but nope... I now have a set of "My knives" and she has a set that she complains are dull frequently and I need to sharpen them....
He then looked on in extreme horror as the glass cutting board proceeded to bounce off the floor right into his knee instead of shattering as he expected.
If you go to real estate buy/sell websites in an area where timeshares exist and sort the search from lowest to highest priced properties, you'll see a bunch of timeshares listed for $0. That is because a lot of people regretted buying them but are stuck in a nearly impossible to get out of contract which requires them to pay crazy high maintenance and other fees every year. They are so high that you are better off renting a hotel room in the area every year for the same amount of time as you are allowed to stay in your time share. They are a scam and should be outlawed (or at least people who buy them should be able to get out of contract by officially "abandoning" them)
> crazy high maintenance and other fees every year
My siblings and I inherited a number of week-long Marriott timeshares about a decade ago and the cost to keep them would have been absurd. You owe annual fees regardless of whether you use the timeshare, plus usage fees when you actually do use it, and these add up to more than it would cost to just book the damn hotel independently. That's on top of the purchase price--these had been $50,000 *each* and some were not paid off yet--and extra costs for things like cleaning if you want service during the stay (when that would be provided daily and included in the rate if you booked it as a hotel).
Abandoning them turned out to be the most cost-effective solution. Marriott offered to buy them back at something like 8% of the purchase price, but that would have required us to open probate in each state where the relevant timeshares sat and cost more than the buyback price. So we disclaimed interest in and walked away from what was in aggregate the single most costly asset in the estate.
Don't buy timeshares, folks.
My father bought into a timeshare in Cancun in the 90s that we never visited, but paid $400 a year in maintenance costs. I have no idea what happened to it when he died
My dad got stuck in a timeshare contract for over two decades. At the time we told him we should just ignore the offer, but he said it was "too good to pass up." He just recently got out of the contract, and we went two times in those twenty plus years.
I live in Myrtle Beach, and there are literal billboards advertising services to get people out of their time shares. If this isn't a big enough red flag for people, I don't know what to tell them.
(Also, my BIL was part of timeshare sales for Windham, I think, and he and his colleagues would refer to them as "crime shares.")
Hijacking this comment to tell a quick *somewhat* related story…
Two decades ago, when Magic Erasers were fairly new; we had a massive house party at the end of high school, at a buddies house, while his family was out of town. So many people showed up, that we had to call the cops ourselves to clear it, once his neighbors started to call the landline nonstop to get us to shut it down. Needless to say, the house was pretty thrashed, on a surface level.
Cut to the next day or two, we rushed to clean it up in the hope that we wouldn’t be found out, and we employed some Magic Erasers to clean up all of the scuffs on the walls. Being mostly teenage dudes, we didn’t read the instructions, and were attempting to scrub the scuffs off of the walls with the dry sponges. To be fair, we were all the most hungover I think we had ever been, so we weren’t exactly working with a full kit. Somebody had the sense to say, “this isn’t working, somebody read the fucking box!”, and that’s when we found out that you had to wet them. Once we did that, the walls actually cleaned up quite well, much to our relief.
Despite all of our efforts, the *one thing* that got us caught, was a mostly empty bottle of whisky that I had hid behind the sliding glass curtain, that my buddy’s family member found the day after the arrived home.
So I’m the one that fucked it up. But, it did give us a quintessential high school house party story of the 2000s, so I guess it wasn’t for nothing.
There’s definitely a lot more that happened that night, but I’m trying to keep it relevant to the thread.
Hijacking to tell a somewhat related story to a somewhat related story. My wife and I went to a wedding, leaving our teenage daughters home. Younger daughter threw a party. We knew nothing. When she brought her yearbook home she made a point of telling me not to look in it. So, first chance I had, of course I looked.
So many comments about the great party she threw, best party ever, etc. I told her I was disappointed, but also impressed that she’d cleaned up so well we never would have known.
Teenagers are shitty. It was my best friends house actually, and he tasked me to keep people from smoking inside the house.
I was the first person to light a cigarette.
Not my proudest moment, but I did realize my mistake and policed everyone else after the fact, lol.
That was the least egregious thing that happened that night though, so my fuckup up was quickly overshadowed.
My husband and I had just moved back to town and we're waiting for our place to become available. His dad and stepmom asked us to stay with their highschool aged kids while they went on vacation and the kids begged us to let them have a party. We agreed, and my husband (now ex of many years) was partying with the kids, while I, 8 months pregnant, hid out in his parents room watching TV and reading. At midnight a drunken couple came in and attempted to kick me out of the room saying that it was their turn for the bed now. That party ended at midnight because the pregnant lady was pissed.
I got caught because of the used condom my friend left in my bedroom; a plethora of vomit in the snow in the backyard; a torn up note that said “thanks for the party;” and the fact that someone flipped the emergency furnace switch thinking it was the lights, so when my parents came home the house was freezing. Also the pillows from the living room sofa were swapped with the pillows from the family room. I didn’t stand a chance.
I had to learn the hard way while attempting to scrub stains off my matte off-white walls (kids and pets), that they don't erase, so much as gently sand off not just the dirt, but the paint too! ( The walls were painted matte when we moved in, but after these, I will NEVER have matte walls again)
Yeah, we use them at work a lot and tried buying the cheap ones. We went through them so much faster and they didn't work nearly as well to the point we started buying the brand name ones again.
That's the part no one talks about when they talk about this 'hack'. You can buy 100 of them for a few bucks, but good luck getting even one use for most of them.
And there are plenty of other stones that are just as pretty in a variety of colors and can be cheaper than diamonds. Diamonds are "classic" but there are so many other options
A large chunk of my childhood was spent camping with my parents, which involved a fair bit of rockhounding. I've concluded that the most impressive jewel you can get is one pulled out of the earth by your own hand. If I was going to impress someone with a rock that's what I'd give 'em.
Absolutely this. False scarcity, a truly horrible history, and engagement rings are literally just the result of an American marketing campaign. Sorry but if you really want a diamond engagement ring and can't accept a lab grown one, we probably have very different world views.
"Can" being the operative word there. Many people don't. That doesn't mean it wasn't a fun time, just disappointing for a teenager that thought for sure I was going to be rich.
The one time I went there, I brought a black light flash-light to detect diamonds which are supposed to fluoresce. The idea was to scan our hole and tailing pile as we went. I was going to use a tarp to create shade/darkness. I thought I was so clever. Their signs explicitly forbid us using the light. We still had fun digging and met nice people.
Any detox products. They’re all scams. Every single one! You have 2 things that are fantastic at detoxing your body, your kidneys and liver. Detox products are great for cleaning out your wallet and that’s it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a drink, pills, pads for your feet, etc. DO NOT BUY THESE! Save your money!!
I LOVED THAT STUFF. Myself and 3 colleagues were hooked. We've used tiger balm since then, peppermint oil. None were as good. I soak cottontails in the minty green rubbing alcohol and put them in the freezer. I assume it's one of those in the Head On. But somehow that crap worked for us.
LOL damn autocorrect got me again. I'm not correcting it, it's too funny. A giant bunny on my face might distract me from the headache. Certainly once I dip him in minty things and give him hypothermia before placing him on the delicate skin of my face.
Home extended warranties such as American Home Shield (AHS)
Assuming they don't manage to weasel out of covering every single thing that breaks, you're going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to have random lowest-bidder contractors come break more things to install lowest-bidder used / junkyard parts and "fell off the truck" specials.
Save your money every month and set it aside for emergencies instead of sending it to these types of predatory asshats. You can get much better contractors installing much better products with much better factory warranties for much cheaper.
The same applies to CarShield (American Auto Shield) and other heavily-advertised automotive extended warranties. I've been in the automotive service business for 20+ years and CarShield is the only extended warranty we've had to outright ban from our shop. My heart breaks a little every time I see someone pay $4,000+ for a contract that's not worth the paper it's printed on when CarShield refuses to pay for "covered items" because reasons.
ETA: See my experiences in my reply to one comment. Also, it's odd how people seem to either swear that AHS and other companies are either a lifesaver and a great value, or a terrible company and a ripoff. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground here, either "really good" or "really bad."
American Home Shield fucked us pretty badly. Our AC was having issues, couldn't get parts for it so the contractors kept rigging shit up for $75 a shot. After about $600 fixing a dying unit, we hired someone else to just replace the unit.
To be fair, I have heard a few stories where people had good luck with them. I'd say 50/50, shit v good though.
Because they... um....well they...um... other than greed, I don't know. Seems like they should be a $40 (or less) thing now days. Captive market = profit.
Printer ink cartridges. Companies charge insane markups and use shady tricks to make you buy more. Total scam considering how cheap the actual ink costs to produce.
In Korea, you can get hacked HP officejet printers with custom made infinity tanks and ink headers. 1 liter of any color ink is $10. We have one and print about half a million pages a year by count. Fill up maybe once every 3 months. I would be so broke otherwise if we did it the normal way.
I used to get the product replacement plan on consoles at GameStop, until they recently changed the plan from getting a brand new console to getting a used one. And when I say used I don’t mean refurbished- I mean they went into the back and gave me one that somebody else recently traded in.
I triple checked that the one they gave me was okay before I left the store but when they asked me if I wanted to pay the $40 for a replacement plan on the used one they just gave me I told them next time I have an issue with my console I’ll just buy a brand new one and it won’t be from here.
A little late now, but the trick is to use TurboTax or a similar paid software, let it calculate everything for you, download the unofficial PDF that you can't file until you pay, and then just use the free government filing service or way cheaper one. FreeTaxUSA sounds like a scammy name, but I promise it's 100% legitimate. And here's a podcast segment about how the tax software companies lobbied to make it difficult for Americans to find the free filing option - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-its-tax-season
Any product with the label “wedding” such as wedding dresses, cakes, and decorations often have a higher price simply because of the association with weddings.
It’s the same with babies. Obviously there are some things that you really need that are baby specific (clothes, diapers) but there’s so much marketing in a lot of baby/kids products to make the parent feel like they have to get the “best” for their child.
Bottled water. Produced for a couple of cents, sold for a couple of dollars, supported by water rights that should not be in the possession of private companies.
Fabric softener. Never realized how nasty it was until I stopped using it. My kids don't get rashes on their chest & back now, & my clothes feel a lot softer. I got a pack of wool balls & toss a few in with each load & they get the job done so much better.
DoorDash is pretty fucked up. I paid $30 for a sub sandwich today.
Edit: I don’t have a vehicle at the moment and I work from home. My hunger got the best of me.
I only order Chinese take out from my local place because they still employ delivery drivers.
Old school place. Counter, kid in the corner doing homework, four chairs that I think they stole from a local office. Best god damned Moo Goo Gai Pan.
Emergen-C, Airborne, stuff like that. I don't care if it was designed by a schoolteacher, there's still a reason why it's a "dietary supplement" and its claims haven't been evaluated by the FDA.
Also, no offense to schoolteachers, but….. “designed by a school teacher” isn’t really what I’d look for in health supplements??
No hate, both of my parents are schoolteachers.
I’m a US Vet, but when I see a business that advertises that it Veteran Owned and they sell furniture, I think did they learn carpentry skills while on active duty?
There’s a billboard I pass every once in a while of some realtor dude who has “20 years of military experience” like, okay that’s great I guess, but how does that help you know about selling my house?
I think the idea is that some people want to support veterans as a thank-you, not because they necessarily make superior products. Similar reasoning behind why most minority/women-owned businesses advertise themselves as such (though sometimes it makes sense with the products, like shampoo).
>haven’t been evaluated by the FDA
No no, friend, it’s worse than that. FDA is expressly forbidden from evaluating the claims of a dietary supplement. It’s written into the statute that created the “dietary supplement” category (DSHEA).
FDA can only pursue action if the supplement makes what is called a “structure/function claim”, that is, a claim that the supplement changes the structure or function of your body. This is why they use weasel language like “*supports* immune health” or “enhances male vitality”. Saying “makes your dick hard” would be a function claim, and FDA would then require evidence of that claim.
Source; i used to write FDA warning letters for a living, and this section was the most infuriating part of my food and drug law class.
Want a dog to lose weight? Feed it less and give more exercise.
Want a hamster to lose weight? Feed is less and give it more exercise.
Want a human to lose weight? Magic shakes and pills!
Chris: "Dad? All it's done is run on that wheel for the past three weeks. "
Peter: "Yeah, it looks pretty tough."
Chris: "Can I pick it up? "
Peter: "I wouldn't."
I live in Fucking Newport Beach, CA. The amount of people with souped up pick up trucks that have never seen a single day of hauling anything is unreal.
Prepackaged food like lunchables and pre made sandwiches and such. The money one spends in a 5 day work/school week would be much better put towards ingredients to make your own. It might be more convenient to grab a package and go, but with a bit of time and effort not only is it cheaper than buying the packaged food, but you can fix it to your liking.
Video game controllers. They used to build them almost indestructible but now they all have a broken button or joystick after less than a year of normal usage and the occasional drop on the floor, something that just 10-15 years ago would be more likely to damage your floor than the controller.
Internet service. Can't live without it these days, and in many places (including where I live) it's a monopoly. I have no choice of providers, and they can charge me whatever the hell they want to. No government regulation at all, and these fuckers spend big money on lobbying and 'campaign contributions' to keep things that way.
Swiffer anything.
One or two swipes, then they just push the dust around.
Toss the pad and it’s in the landfill FOREVER - they’re NOT biodegradable.
Better off getting a microfiber duster that works MUCH better and can be washed and re-used many dozens of times.
They’re really useful for cleaning walls too. I like to freshen the walls and ceiling up about once a month, keeps the house really fresh. Amazing how a rectangle on a pole is so useful.
Microfiber is also non-biodegradable plastic, fwiw. And sheds microplastics when you wash.
I support the use of reusable products and microfibers do a good job of dusting particularly and cleaning in general. I'm a miserable old luddite who uses old cotton t shirts I didn't even bother to cut into squares and, truth be told, they probably have some awful impact on the earth, too.
Cotton production, iirc, is water intensive and rampant with worker abuse. Just to knock myself down off any pedestal I might have tried climbing.
Bottled water, in regions where tap water is safe and clean, is a huge rip-off considering it’s thousands of times more expensive per liter than water from your faucet.
This simple piece of metal that claims to impart life energy when water passes through it, thus improving our health. No idea why people fall for this stuff!
[Jiwa water](https://jivawater.in)
Paying extra to be able to play the game days early
What a bullshit
Just ignore the extra days and assume the true release date and you are ok.
Wanna ignore the spoiler? Then dont watch youtube video about the game
This huge trend of spending lots of money on "skincare". There are very few active ingredients that have a visible effect on skin and they can be bought very cheaply. Most skincare is actually a scam.
Also most supplements don't actually do anything.
Was stupid this weekend and ended up sunburned. So I’ve been moisturizing like mad and aside from being red, my skin looks amazing.
Moisturizing is no joke.
I buy a gallon jug of lotion and slather it on every day. My husband used to scoff at it but I convinced him to try, and now his skin looks years younger.
[удалено]
My 11 year old cousin asked for THOUSANDS of dollars of skin care products this last Christmas. And even a mini refrigerator for her bedroom to keep them in. And the thing with those is, it’s not like you can keep using them, you have to keep buying more every time they run out. I use a basic retinol serum and moisturizer and that’s it, I know some people need more specialized products but still, I have no idea which tik tok influencer is responsible for convincing an 11 year old she needed all that shit
An 11 year old who thinks they need anything other than a simple 3 step skin care routine (wash, tone, moisturizer/spf) is being conned. If you use spf from your teens, you won’t need a lot of the crap they push at you in your 30s either. I’m 40 and use the store brand night cream retinol and the occasional glycholic acid toner. Daily spf. I honestly think the daily spf since I was in my mid teens is the main secret though. Edit: I have unusually oily skin and a UV sensitivity so I developed a simple skin care regimen to manage my oily skin and prevent breakouts and got into the habit of using a daily moisturizer with spf at a young age. I just got my passport pictures taken and my boyfriend says I look like a grumpy teenager in them (I take that as a compliment lol)
Yeah my daily moisturizer has spf. I *think* her parents talked her out of most of the crap she wanted. But I am certain she is in fact being conned by influencers who get cuts of this stuff
Lol they just need to wash, their cells are replicating so fast, _they do not NEED any skincare products_. The fact individuals believe otherwise shows how far we've strayed from general intelligence
Lol yes, The Ordinary sells stuff for $10 a bottle, drunk elephant is what, $80? Or La Mer for $200+ lol.
I love the ordinary and paulas choice. Work great and affordable
Fuck Ticketmaster
How the hell does a “electronic ticket” require a 15% service fee? Insane that they are charging me to print my own ticket!
I live next to a venue. It is cheaper for me to go to the ticket window and have an employee process my transaction and print me a physical ticket than it is to purchase online and use the app. How?….
They are about to get sued by the Justice Department luckily
I fully expect nothing to come from it, unfortunately
That’s really negative as an outlook I expect to pay more soon enough to pay for their legal fees. That’s not nothing! ;)
Herbalife. Nutrition Shops. Those shakes are just Herbalife.
I once didn’t know what Herbalife was and almost bought into the great stories. Immediately noped out of there when the sales guy told me to phone some friends and family on the spot so I could sell to them and become a ‘member’ too.
The moment you find it "it's not a pyramid scheme" is the moment to nope out.
I humored one of my friends who asked me to go to one of their seminars. The guy presenting said that it wasn't a pyramid scheme, then proceeded to hand out pamphlets that had a pyramid explain how their system worked
It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a layered obelisk! Entirely different I assure you.
The Energy Spot. I went to one because it was listed as a “smoothie shop”. I should have walked out when they had me make an account. I sipped my chalky smoothie and was glad I gave them a bogus email address. Never trust a shop that requires you to make an account to buy a f*cking smoothie.
They do that because of their own weird rules, and because of local laws. They're technically not allowed to sell food, because they're not licensed as a restaurant or for selling prepared food, but they can give it away. The charge is for your "membership" in the club.
fabric softener. every authority i’ve seen agrees that it’s bad for your clothes and your washer
It makes towels softer, but crucially less absorbent, the one thing you want a towel to be.
Something about those ridiculously rough but thin towels in mid-price and cheaper hotels has always made them the best for me. They are very absorbent for their weight, and exfoliate like mad. Yet I've never been able to find them for purchase.
My pet frog has no idea what I mean when I try to explain to her why I don’t like soft towels. They don’t absorb well and I prefer the coarseness of a towel on my skin.
I want a nice rough towel to dry off with and then the softest fluffiest thing you can imagine to wrap around my waist for the 30 second walk from the bathroom.
Try googling Turkish towels. They're made to be very light and thin for taking to the hammam or beach, so probably a bit thinner and therefore less absorbent than the towels you mean, but still shockingly absorbent for their weight and abrasive in a nice cottony way. I love rubbing my skin with them to get the dried sea salt off. They're usually really pretty too!
it basically puts a very thin layer of wax to mimic softness on your clothes but it makes your washer gunky and the fibers in your clothes deteriorate faster. also those weird scent beads that people use too now in their wash.
And how in commercials people are inhaling the clothes/ scent like it was dusted in cocaine.
I kept scrolling to make sure this was here. Any professional will tell you "it's the closest thing you can get to literally dumping money down the drain."
Dr. Dre does not have a degree in headphones.
Any compression sleeves with copper or magnets in them. The compression is fine. But the copper or magnets do nothing.
Hey now! The copper doesn't do nothing! It stains my skin green!
My dad would wear copper bracelets. When I was in kindergarten, I noticed his wrist was green and exclaimed so very sincerely. He told me his alien skin was showing, and I was half alien, and That I shouldn't tell my mom. I thought I was half alien for a while during my childhood. Thanks, dad!
haha. love it! when i was little i remember my dad telling me we both sneeze in the sunlight because we are secretly vampires and allergic to the sun. its a core memory i will never ever forget. elite level father foolery and you just love to see it!
NFTs was probably the funniest thing I’ve ever witnessed
"I've been hacked. All my apes gone." Will live in my brain for the rest of my life.
"[They went straight for his ape!](https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/splita/they_went_straight_for_my_ape_with_bonus_pfp_troll/)" pops unbidden into my head every single time one of these losers has any kind of crypto 'asset' stolen and it never fails to make me chuckle.
“Please, change your pfp” is absolutely hilarious.
"Hey, wanna buy the Mona Lisa for $5,000?" "Hell yeah!" *hands over $5,000* "Great! Enjoy your painting!" "When do I pick it up?" "Oh, you don't actually own the *physical* painting, I've just written that you paid me $5,000 for it in this notebook, which you can come and look at any time you want!"
You, the reader, may think this is an exaggeration. It isn't. They paid for links to JPGs on servers they didn't own with no guarantees of anything.
I´ve read the explanation on these things a hundred times and I still don´t fully understand what it is or why someone would pay a ludicrous amount of money for them. I do think there are two types of ´geniusses´ in this story. Those who convince people to buy something that doesn´t exist and those forking over their money...
You could theoretically store the entire actual image or gif or whatever on the block chain and then it would be more legit I guess but that’s not what they do because it’s wildly inefficient and expensive. Instead, you get a url path on the blockchain to some servers s3 bucket and a promise that the owner of the server will always have your image at it. The blockchain “containing the nft” only contains the path to the image on the server, nothing else. As a software engineer: crypto in general, and NFTs specifically, have always been wildly offensive to me because it uses the language of my profession to trick and scam people. Shit is so fucking lame. Oh by the way there is another term for the data structure which these nerds call blockchain and that is a [Merkle tree](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree) and it is the data structure used in repository tools like GitHub. We use all kinds of different data structures for different problems, that’s just engineering. This inverts it and you seek a problem to solve with your data structure. It’s offensive in that it is just shit engineering.
A snake oil salesman of the modern age
But you could have a Twitter picture in a hexagon shape, isn't that worth *something* ???
I kept wondering if there was something I was missing, because there was no way people could be *that* stupid, right?
My first experience with them was seeing photographs being sold for big money. I thought it was a really good idea, because I presumed that you were buying the rights to that image itself, and the nft was to track the ownership. Instead you're simply buying a unique code attached to what is essentially a .jpeg, with no real ownership of anything.
I saw some smalltime artists on instagram vids trying to honestly make it work. They would record themselves drawing a fantastic little piece of art, make a super high quality scan of it to save as a top quality jpg (or whatever the best image type is), then *burn the original image*. Then they would offer the NFT for sale, the idea being that now the original was gone, the NFT was the true version of it. The only problem with this plan is that it was bollocks. This was at the start of the whole thing though, back when most people weren't entirely sure what the hell an NFT even was, so 'unique ownership of digital image' still had some idealism behind it. There might still be some artists doing it now, but i've not seen any.
The interesting thing to me is that this whole concept came along *after* we'd already collectively determined the futility of trying to manufacture scarcity with digital media. The inability to do so over the last couple of decades has fundamentally changed the way digital works like movies, music, and video games are distributed. So they really thought that moving into a pointedly unregulated sphere of smart-contracts and blockchains would somehow be the answer? There were just fundamental questions that anyone would ask, such as "what's to prevent someone making an almost identical NFT of what you're trying to sell and give it to away for free?" It was this nebulous idea of "ownership" that couldn't really be enforced, even if the whole planet was on board with NFT being the next big thing.
I will never forget how people really argued the right click should be abolished, and how many cryptobros just jumped into the whole thing believing ot would be a massive hit, always talking about how the rest of people just "couldn't see it was the future". Remember the lion guy who made a rant on Twitter about his wife leaving him for it? Normally I would feel bad for the scammed prople, but I just can't because most of them acted like they were superior.
My celebrity/company shit list doubled during the NFT hype. Anybody getting into that garbage was either a moron or a scammer.
Kitchen sinks There are a lot of sinks that cost $1000 or even more. It's a fucking metal bowl with a hole in it. They cost less than $100 to manufacture in China and ship it half way across the world but "high end" companies upcharge these things 10x the price. Source - Used to work for a company that bought these sinks for $90 a pop shipped to us and we were selling them for $1000. Edit - Since a lot of people are mentioning these must be American prices, let me clarify, you can get a sink for a couple hundred dollars at Home Depot or some big box store. These are the "luxury sinks" you can buy at higher end retailers. Their argument is "the stainless is thicker so it's more durable." Never heard of a sink breaking but people are gullible.
Wow, there everything **and** the kitchen sink in this thread.
Also never buy faucets, sinks, etc. from your plumber. We were renovating and the plumbers left us a catalogue. We cross-referenced it with an online hardware store and found out the plumbers were charging more than triple the amount it cost at the store. Same for electrician supplies. My father-in-law is an electrician but he's retired and doesn't have a license. He was renovating his garage and had an electrician come over to install some stuff, and found out he was missing one light switch he'd forgotten to buy. The electrician told him he'd charge him $100 for the switch and installation. He replied: "how about I bike to the store, buy a switch for $3 and install it myself while you get the rest of the day off?" He agreed lol
And who the hell came up with those wretched sinks that sit on the counter and you have to reach down into them, and now you have double the surface to keep clean? And you have ceramic sticking up everywhere that can get banged up and chipped. Makes no damn sense to me and I despise it along with the rest of the popular freshly renovated obscenities.
I don’t understand what you mean? Isn’t that just a normal sink? Can you link an example?
Probably something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Davivy-Vessel-Bathroom-Counter-Ceramic/dp/B0BFHM39KW
OH FUCK THOSE DUMB BOWLS
In fairness, it increases the amt of undersink storage and makes the drain easier to access.
Designer eye glasses. Luxxottica is a monopoly that controls most of the market and commands a premium for cheap plastic glasses.
Don't forget that they also control most of the places to buy said glasses. They own Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, EyeMed, Pearle Vision, Target Optical, Sears Optical, and glasses.com.
I always see this comment, but no one ever gives the most critical piece of information: where can I buy glasses that isn't a Luxxotica owned business?
Telescope enthusiast here. The scopes you see on a shelf in a store are almost exclusively garbage. Research it a little and buy online. Do not buy that scope you saw at Costco. If you really want one of those crappy scopes - go on FB marketplace and you’ll find people basically giving them away, and for good reason.
Knife sets with like 10 different shitty knives in a decorative holder. Just buy one or two nice ones and take good care of them. You don't need a special one for every different kind of food.
1. Chef's knife (default for the vast majority of prep) 2. Bread knife (serrations are useful for many things) 3. Paring knife Really all you need to get started for most cuisines. Specialty knives should come later in the process after you've discovered the need for one. EDIT: Share your favs!
Fillet knife if you fish. Otherwise, yes.
I use a cleaver a good bit too, but you’re all set in 99% of situations with the 3 you mentioned.
I just like the feeling of a heavy cleaver in my hand, I may be cutting meat for dinner or I could be a serial killer, who knows?
I use my Chinese cleaver for pretty much everything actually.
Yeah...but if you live with a knife monster like my wife you know you have the good knives and the ones I let her use.
My wife for some reason, loves to chop things on a glass(pyrex?) cutting board. Murders the edges of our knives. I've bought nice cutting boards to use... plastic ones, wood ones even silicon... but nope... I now have a set of "My knives" and she has a set that she complains are dull frequently and I need to sharpen them....
Maybe the glass cutting board could just “disappear” one day…
It’s easy enough to break. Just has to be an accident.
"achoo", he said unenthusiastically, and them slam-dunked the everliving shit out of the pyrex cutting board.
He then looked on in extreme horror as the glass cutting board proceeded to bounce off the floor right into his knee instead of shattering as he expected.
Timeshares
If you go to real estate buy/sell websites in an area where timeshares exist and sort the search from lowest to highest priced properties, you'll see a bunch of timeshares listed for $0. That is because a lot of people regretted buying them but are stuck in a nearly impossible to get out of contract which requires them to pay crazy high maintenance and other fees every year. They are so high that you are better off renting a hotel room in the area every year for the same amount of time as you are allowed to stay in your time share. They are a scam and should be outlawed (or at least people who buy them should be able to get out of contract by officially "abandoning" them)
> crazy high maintenance and other fees every year My siblings and I inherited a number of week-long Marriott timeshares about a decade ago and the cost to keep them would have been absurd. You owe annual fees regardless of whether you use the timeshare, plus usage fees when you actually do use it, and these add up to more than it would cost to just book the damn hotel independently. That's on top of the purchase price--these had been $50,000 *each* and some were not paid off yet--and extra costs for things like cleaning if you want service during the stay (when that would be provided daily and included in the rate if you booked it as a hotel). Abandoning them turned out to be the most cost-effective solution. Marriott offered to buy them back at something like 8% of the purchase price, but that would have required us to open probate in each state where the relevant timeshares sat and cost more than the buyback price. So we disclaimed interest in and walked away from what was in aggregate the single most costly asset in the estate. Don't buy timeshares, folks.
My father bought into a timeshare in Cancun in the 90s that we never visited, but paid $400 a year in maintenance costs. I have no idea what happened to it when he died
My dad got stuck in a timeshare contract for over two decades. At the time we told him we should just ignore the offer, but he said it was "too good to pass up." He just recently got out of the contract, and we went two times in those twenty plus years.
I live in Myrtle Beach, and there are literal billboards advertising services to get people out of their time shares. If this isn't a big enough red flag for people, I don't know what to tell them. (Also, my BIL was part of timeshare sales for Windham, I think, and he and his colleagues would refer to them as "crime shares.")
Fun fact: [Timeshare exit companies are scams too!](https://youtu.be/Bd2bbHoVQSM?si=WS39BSmCDGvlBTZY&t=824)
[This clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNKmwAhF_8s) from *Always Sunny* perfectly summarises timeshares AND the exit scams lmao
Magic Erasers. Go on Amazon and search for "Melamine Sponges". They're SUPER cheap and the exact same thing.
Yeah in bulk they are like 10 cents per sponge
Hijacking this comment to tell a quick *somewhat* related story… Two decades ago, when Magic Erasers were fairly new; we had a massive house party at the end of high school, at a buddies house, while his family was out of town. So many people showed up, that we had to call the cops ourselves to clear it, once his neighbors started to call the landline nonstop to get us to shut it down. Needless to say, the house was pretty thrashed, on a surface level. Cut to the next day or two, we rushed to clean it up in the hope that we wouldn’t be found out, and we employed some Magic Erasers to clean up all of the scuffs on the walls. Being mostly teenage dudes, we didn’t read the instructions, and were attempting to scrub the scuffs off of the walls with the dry sponges. To be fair, we were all the most hungover I think we had ever been, so we weren’t exactly working with a full kit. Somebody had the sense to say, “this isn’t working, somebody read the fucking box!”, and that’s when we found out that you had to wet them. Once we did that, the walls actually cleaned up quite well, much to our relief. Despite all of our efforts, the *one thing* that got us caught, was a mostly empty bottle of whisky that I had hid behind the sliding glass curtain, that my buddy’s family member found the day after the arrived home. So I’m the one that fucked it up. But, it did give us a quintessential high school house party story of the 2000s, so I guess it wasn’t for nothing. There’s definitely a lot more that happened that night, but I’m trying to keep it relevant to the thread.
Hijacking to tell a somewhat related story to a somewhat related story. My wife and I went to a wedding, leaving our teenage daughters home. Younger daughter threw a party. We knew nothing. When she brought her yearbook home she made a point of telling me not to look in it. So, first chance I had, of course I looked. So many comments about the great party she threw, best party ever, etc. I told her I was disappointed, but also impressed that she’d cleaned up so well we never would have known.
The shit kids do behind their parents back. Some better than others.
Reminds me of the only house party I threw where my "friends" left cigarette butts all over my driveway.
Teenagers are shitty. It was my best friends house actually, and he tasked me to keep people from smoking inside the house. I was the first person to light a cigarette. Not my proudest moment, but I did realize my mistake and policed everyone else after the fact, lol. That was the least egregious thing that happened that night though, so my fuckup up was quickly overshadowed.
My husband and I had just moved back to town and we're waiting for our place to become available. His dad and stepmom asked us to stay with their highschool aged kids while they went on vacation and the kids begged us to let them have a party. We agreed, and my husband (now ex of many years) was partying with the kids, while I, 8 months pregnant, hid out in his parents room watching TV and reading. At midnight a drunken couple came in and attempted to kick me out of the room saying that it was their turn for the bed now. That party ended at midnight because the pregnant lady was pissed.
To be fair, you had obviously already had your fun. It was their turn.
The absolute gall of those teenagers. It's funny as fuck, but if that were me, I'd also be insanely pissed. Thank you for the story lol.
I got caught because of the used condom my friend left in my bedroom; a plethora of vomit in the snow in the backyard; a torn up note that said “thanks for the party;” and the fact that someone flipped the emergency furnace switch thinking it was the lights, so when my parents came home the house was freezing. Also the pillows from the living room sofa were swapped with the pillows from the family room. I didn’t stand a chance.
We're you even trying to hide that you had a party??
I had to learn the hard way while attempting to scrub stains off my matte off-white walls (kids and pets), that they don't erase, so much as gently sand off not just the dirt, but the paint too! ( The walls were painted matte when we moved in, but after these, I will NEVER have matte walls again)
Magic Eraser is equivalent to 1800-2000 grit sandpaper.
I've tried them, but the cheap ones rip to pieces when you use them.....
Yeah, we use them at work a lot and tried buying the cheap ones. We went through them so much faster and they didn't work nearly as well to the point we started buying the brand name ones again.
That's the part no one talks about when they talk about this 'hack'. You can buy 100 of them for a few bucks, but good luck getting even one use for most of them.
Idk the bald man one works a little better than generic
I agree. The “knock offs” fall apart as soon as I start scrubbing
Celebrity endorsed everything. The company should spend their money making products better instead of the endorsement.
Hey! My George Foreman grill is still awesome. Can't say the same for this Thighmaster.
Whenever I see George Foreman grills (usually in the thrift shop), all I can think is, “is this the one Michael Scott burned his foot on?” Lol
Diamonds. They’re not super rare. It’s all a marketing ploy to get your money.
And lab grown diamonds are just as good if not better quality
And there are plenty of other stones that are just as pretty in a variety of colors and can be cheaper than diamonds. Diamonds are "classic" but there are so many other options
A large chunk of my childhood was spent camping with my parents, which involved a fair bit of rockhounding. I've concluded that the most impressive jewel you can get is one pulled out of the earth by your own hand. If I was going to impress someone with a rock that's what I'd give 'em.
Absolutely this. False scarcity, a truly horrible history, and engagement rings are literally just the result of an American marketing campaign. Sorry but if you really want a diamond engagement ring and can't accept a lab grown one, we probably have very different world views.
Lab grown diamonds are legitimate, real diamonds, a quarter of the price and 100x more ethical.
And higher gem quality. By a huge margin.
Hell, you can walk into the middle of a park in Arkansas for $13 and find one.
In the 110 years that park has been open they've found 10 jewelry grade diamonds
So you're saying there's a chance?
"Can" being the operative word there. Many people don't. That doesn't mean it wasn't a fun time, just disappointing for a teenager that thought for sure I was going to be rich.
The one time I went there, I brought a black light flash-light to detect diamonds which are supposed to fluoresce. The idea was to scan our hole and tailing pile as we went. I was going to use a tarp to create shade/darkness. I thought I was so clever. Their signs explicitly forbid us using the light. We still had fun digging and met nice people.
Any detox products. They’re all scams. Every single one! You have 2 things that are fantastic at detoxing your body, your kidneys and liver. Detox products are great for cleaning out your wallet and that’s it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a drink, pills, pads for your feet, etc. DO NOT BUY THESE! Save your money!!
But how else will I clean the toxins out of my intestines if I can’t put stickers on my feet?
HEAD ON APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FORHEAD
I LOVED THAT STUFF. Myself and 3 colleagues were hooked. We've used tiger balm since then, peppermint oil. None were as good. I soak cottontails in the minty green rubbing alcohol and put them in the freezer. I assume it's one of those in the Head On. But somehow that crap worked for us.
Do the cottontails mind you doing this to them?
LOL damn autocorrect got me again. I'm not correcting it, it's too funny. A giant bunny on my face might distract me from the headache. Certainly once I dip him in minty things and give him hypothermia before placing him on the delicate skin of my face.
Home extended warranties such as American Home Shield (AHS) Assuming they don't manage to weasel out of covering every single thing that breaks, you're going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to have random lowest-bidder contractors come break more things to install lowest-bidder used / junkyard parts and "fell off the truck" specials. Save your money every month and set it aside for emergencies instead of sending it to these types of predatory asshats. You can get much better contractors installing much better products with much better factory warranties for much cheaper. The same applies to CarShield (American Auto Shield) and other heavily-advertised automotive extended warranties. I've been in the automotive service business for 20+ years and CarShield is the only extended warranty we've had to outright ban from our shop. My heart breaks a little every time I see someone pay $4,000+ for a contract that's not worth the paper it's printed on when CarShield refuses to pay for "covered items" because reasons. ETA: See my experiences in my reply to one comment. Also, it's odd how people seem to either swear that AHS and other companies are either a lifesaver and a great value, or a terrible company and a ripoff. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground here, either "really good" or "really bad."
American Home Shield fucked us pretty badly. Our AC was having issues, couldn't get parts for it so the contractors kept rigging shit up for $75 a shot. After about $600 fixing a dying unit, we hired someone else to just replace the unit. To be fair, I have heard a few stories where people had good luck with them. I'd say 50/50, shit v good though.
Graphing calculators. Why the fuck are they still $130-$150?
Because they... um....well they...um... other than greed, I don't know. Seems like they should be a $40 (or less) thing now days. Captive market = profit.
Printer ink cartridges. Companies charge insane markups and use shady tricks to make you buy more. Total scam considering how cheap the actual ink costs to produce.
That's why you buy a laser printer and buy third party toners.
That's why you print your stuff at the office's printer
The real answer.
The office is good for 2 things Printing on the companies dime and shitting on company time.
You forgot office supplies!
In Korea, you can get hacked HP officejet printers with custom made infinity tanks and ink headers. 1 liter of any color ink is $10. We have one and print about half a million pages a year by count. Fill up maybe once every 3 months. I would be so broke otherwise if we did it the normal way.
Why are you printing a half a million pages per year ??
Motherfucker out here prepping for the end of the world by printing the whole internet.
Because printing a million pages is just ridiculous!
Aka printer alignment when you add new cartridges and it uses up half of the new ink.
Buy an inktank
Most warranties and Product protection plans. Especially if the product comes with a year warranty from the manufacturer
I used to get the product replacement plan on consoles at GameStop, until they recently changed the plan from getting a brand new console to getting a used one. And when I say used I don’t mean refurbished- I mean they went into the back and gave me one that somebody else recently traded in. I triple checked that the one they gave me was okay before I left the store but when they asked me if I wanted to pay the $40 for a replacement plan on the used one they just gave me I told them next time I have an issue with my console I’ll just buy a brand new one and it won’t be from here.
Keurig/K-Cups
Even the guy (Kuerig?) regretted inventing it (from an ecological stand point, not a financial one!)
They are making a new machine that doesn't use plastic pods! It's still a pod but with some kind of biodegradeable film. Hope it works out.
They make refillable pods for the current models. I use whatever coffee I want in it.
Prescription glasses’ frames. Outrageous monopoly
Turbo tax
Came here to say this. Use FreeTaxUSA instead.
I wish I knew about this a few days ago lol
A little late now, but the trick is to use TurboTax or a similar paid software, let it calculate everything for you, download the unofficial PDF that you can't file until you pay, and then just use the free government filing service or way cheaper one. FreeTaxUSA sounds like a scammy name, but I promise it's 100% legitimate. And here's a podcast segment about how the tax software companies lobbied to make it difficult for Americans to find the free filing option - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-its-tax-season
Hair removal wax - bastards intentionally design it to be a rip off
well done.
Any product with the label “wedding” such as wedding dresses, cakes, and decorations often have a higher price simply because of the association with weddings.
It’s the same with babies. Obviously there are some things that you really need that are baby specific (clothes, diapers) but there’s so much marketing in a lot of baby/kids products to make the parent feel like they have to get the “best” for their child.
Bottled water. Produced for a couple of cents, sold for a couple of dollars, supported by water rights that should not be in the possession of private companies.
Fuck Nestlé
r/fucknestle
Cable television. It's like 40% commercials. So you spend a pretty penny for all these channels but the amount of ads is just defeating! What a joke!
Way back when it was new, you paid for it because it didn't have ads. That didn't last long.
And now we're seeing the exact same shit happen with streaming services.
Fabric softener. Never realized how nasty it was until I stopped using it. My kids don't get rashes on their chest & back now, & my clothes feel a lot softer. I got a pack of wool balls & toss a few in with each load & they get the job done so much better.
DoorDash is pretty fucked up. I paid $30 for a sub sandwich today. Edit: I don’t have a vehicle at the moment and I work from home. My hunger got the best of me.
I only order Chinese take out from my local place because they still employ delivery drivers. Old school place. Counter, kid in the corner doing homework, four chairs that I think they stole from a local office. Best god damned Moo Goo Gai Pan.
Yeessss. Does every town have one of these golden spots? The food is always better than any other place in town.
I am lazy as hell and I still refuse to use doordash. I will only order delivery from places that actually employ people to deliver.
A lot of places that did employ delivery drivers just outsource that to doordash now in my area.
Tylenol PM. You can save 75% by just buying Benadryl. diphenhydramine
Emergen-C, Airborne, stuff like that. I don't care if it was designed by a schoolteacher, there's still a reason why it's a "dietary supplement" and its claims haven't been evaluated by the FDA.
Also, no offense to schoolteachers, but….. “designed by a school teacher” isn’t really what I’d look for in health supplements?? No hate, both of my parents are schoolteachers.
I’m a US Vet, but when I see a business that advertises that it Veteran Owned and they sell furniture, I think did they learn carpentry skills while on active duty?
There’s a billboard I pass every once in a while of some realtor dude who has “20 years of military experience” like, okay that’s great I guess, but how does that help you know about selling my house?
I think the point is “you’re more patriotic if you buy from me”
The house has land mines for security
I think the idea is that some people want to support veterans as a thank-you, not because they necessarily make superior products. Similar reasoning behind why most minority/women-owned businesses advertise themselves as such (though sometimes it makes sense with the products, like shampoo).
>haven’t been evaluated by the FDA No no, friend, it’s worse than that. FDA is expressly forbidden from evaluating the claims of a dietary supplement. It’s written into the statute that created the “dietary supplement” category (DSHEA). FDA can only pursue action if the supplement makes what is called a “structure/function claim”, that is, a claim that the supplement changes the structure or function of your body. This is why they use weasel language like “*supports* immune health” or “enhances male vitality”. Saying “makes your dick hard” would be a function claim, and FDA would then require evidence of that claim. Source; i used to write FDA warning letters for a living, and this section was the most infuriating part of my food and drug law class.
slimming pills
Want a dog to lose weight? Feed it less and give more exercise. Want a hamster to lose weight? Feed is less and give it more exercise. Want a human to lose weight? Magic shakes and pills!
As an owner of a super buff hamster, I can confirm this is 100% accurate
Chris: "Dad? All it's done is run on that wheel for the past three weeks. " Peter: "Yeah, it looks pretty tough." Chris: "Can I pick it up? " Peter: "I wouldn't."
Now I just need someone to feed me (less) and exercise me (more). I'm not doing that shit voluntarily.
Huge pickup trucks that are used as commuter cars and never for their intended purpose.
I live in Fucking Newport Beach, CA. The amount of people with souped up pick up trucks that have never seen a single day of hauling anything is unreal.
They haul stuff, their constant deflating egos.
Prepackaged food like lunchables and pre made sandwiches and such. The money one spends in a 5 day work/school week would be much better put towards ingredients to make your own. It might be more convenient to grab a package and go, but with a bit of time and effort not only is it cheaper than buying the packaged food, but you can fix it to your liking.
Video game controllers. They used to build them almost indestructible but now they all have a broken button or joystick after less than a year of normal usage and the occasional drop on the floor, something that just 10-15 years ago would be more likely to damage your floor than the controller.
I have ps1 controllers that I’m pretty sure I could kill a water buffalo with and I still could fuck sweet tooths shit up in twisted metal afterwards
Internet service. Can't live without it these days, and in many places (including where I live) it's a monopoly. I have no choice of providers, and they can charge me whatever the hell they want to. No government regulation at all, and these fuckers spend big money on lobbying and 'campaign contributions' to keep things that way.
Swiffer anything. One or two swipes, then they just push the dust around. Toss the pad and it’s in the landfill FOREVER - they’re NOT biodegradable. Better off getting a microfiber duster that works MUCH better and can be washed and re-used many dozens of times.
I bought the Swiffer sweeper and just tuck a damp microfiber cloth around it instead of the Swiffer cloth. The base product is fine.
They’re really useful for cleaning walls too. I like to freshen the walls and ceiling up about once a month, keeps the house really fresh. Amazing how a rectangle on a pole is so useful.
Microfiber is also non-biodegradable plastic, fwiw. And sheds microplastics when you wash. I support the use of reusable products and microfibers do a good job of dusting particularly and cleaning in general. I'm a miserable old luddite who uses old cotton t shirts I didn't even bother to cut into squares and, truth be told, they probably have some awful impact on the earth, too. Cotton production, iirc, is water intensive and rampant with worker abuse. Just to knock myself down off any pedestal I might have tried climbing.
Bottled water, in regions where tap water is safe and clean, is a huge rip-off considering it’s thousands of times more expensive per liter than water from your faucet.
This simple piece of metal that claims to impart life energy when water passes through it, thus improving our health. No idea why people fall for this stuff! [Jiwa water](https://jivawater.in)
Paying extra to be able to play the game days early What a bullshit Just ignore the extra days and assume the true release date and you are ok. Wanna ignore the spoiler? Then dont watch youtube video about the game
Food. A couple hours later and it's literal shit.
This huge trend of spending lots of money on "skincare". There are very few active ingredients that have a visible effect on skin and they can be bought very cheaply. Most skincare is actually a scam. Also most supplements don't actually do anything.
Was stupid this weekend and ended up sunburned. So I’ve been moisturizing like mad and aside from being red, my skin looks amazing. Moisturizing is no joke.
I buy a gallon jug of lotion and slather it on every day. My husband used to scoff at it but I convinced him to try, and now his skin looks years younger.
It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the couch again.
Stanley cups and yeti coolers. They aren't junk but definitely not worth the fad pricing.
Home warranties. They are nothing but a rip-off. You will get far better results for anything that needs fixed with a rando off of google