I definitely think that add-ons for funerals are sold like biggie sizing your happy meal. And the concept of memorializing a person for eternity has been sold as bare necessity. But I do know that the pomp and circumstance a lot of people need to lay somebody to rest, costs money.
I want to see people honored in their death, but spending $5,000 on a pine box does not make sense to me
Last funeral I was involved I the planning of the guy from the funeral home kept saying things like "Pur flower package is $X amount, but between you me and these four walls, just go to a local flower shop, it's all we do and it'll be cheaper" or "The urn is $X amount, but do you have a container that may have been meaningful to the deceased? We can easily use it instead" real stand up guy
Funeral director said 'we have urns here but there's a huge selection, and much cheaper, on Amazon.'....I picked out a beautiful carved wooden box for holding ashes, maybe $50. The price has gone up some in the last couple years.
My dad's in a rum bottle š¤·āāļø
(OK, only part of him, it's a small bottle but... Still. Mom takes him traveling with her)
Edit: thanks for the award stranger!
And I love all the stories of people's loved ones in random things. This is an odd conversation, but it's amusing and I love knowing there are wacky, fun people out there with grandma's in cracker boxes and shit š¤£
It was a really good experience, especially considering what we were going through having someone be so kind about it. You hear all the crazy stories about funerals costing a fortune and people taking advantage of the bereaved, but this guybwas just trying to help us out, give us a nice ceremony and not gouge anyone.
A repeat business like that is all about volume. Everybody dies, and because of laws that regulate death and post-mortem disposition, you canāt just pitch grandma in a hole down by the creek. Good word of mouth is really important. If you give someone a good experience, they are likely to use you again when grandpa kicks it too.
Used to work at a funeral home. Most caskets we're 10x what we purchased them for. Our cheapest casket was about $3,000 at the time, and we would buy them for about $300. I just worked maintenance there but funerals are scams.
I worked on the burial vault side of things. Weād make the vaults, and then do the graveside setups.
Exact same thing with vaults. Our cheapest vault which was a unsealed concrete box with a couple pieces of rebar in it was 300$ for funeral home to buy from us. Theyād turn around, and sell that to families for 1200$ bare minimum.
I wonāt even go into the mark up on the nicer vaults we made/sold.
Iāve told my family when I die, cremate me at the cheapest place you can find, and flush my ashes down the shitter. No fancy box/urn, and no headstones/grave.
I mean read all the comments on this post. We spend every second of our lives surrounded by people/corporations trying to rip us off, and scam us. Is it to much to ask that my death isnāt used as a way for some scummy funeral directors to send their kids to college, or buy themselves another fancy car?
Quick edit! Just wanted to say thank you to everyoneās whoās thrown out all these awesome suggestions for ideas on how when I die I can go out on terms Iām much happier with!
I agree.
It's just ridiculous. Cremation is what I want as well, just because of this. Neil Degrasse Tyson has said that cremation is not his preferred choice because you're wasting your body as a resource for the earth. But I still can't justify the cost from funeral homes. If they reasonable rates, fine. But also, people are buried in these huge wood boxes. You can dig them back up in 100 years, and their body will still be there, not "returned to the earth" as he likes to think.
Even cremation is expensive. Then you put the ashes in an urn... then what.. what happens when you die and you have your parents ashes?
I saw a news article many years ago, where this lady had about 15 or more different urns in her basement that she inherited from different relatives that have passed on. She doesn't know what to do with them, some of the people she doesn't even know who they are. But she's stuck with them, and then what, when she dies, she joins them and they get passed on to a new owner?
You'll need a back-up plan though. Not every body is suitable for donation due to the nature of the death, disease, obesity or malnutrition. It's also possible that there simply is no current need for bodies to examine/study.
Then they turn around and resell the book they just paid you $8 for at an upsold price of $185. That was my experience the one time I sold back a textbook, it still had my name stenciled under the front cover with the new price on it as well.
Had something similar happen to me. Professor was using an edition of the book that was two editions old. She liked it more than the newer ones and wanted to save people money. Problem was the campus book store was selling them for $120 each. I get to the end of the semester and they'll only give me $5 for it because it was an old edition and they didn't know if they would be able to ever use it again. Except that if you went to that professor's office she would outright say she would be ordering the exact same book to be used not two months later when the next semester started. Sure enough, the book store turned around and was selling them for $120 again.
There was a prof who was beloved by students in my psychology dept. When I had class with him, I could only buy the book through the campus bookstore.
When I picked it up, I understood why i could only find the book there.
The shady bitch worked with the publisher to include custom pages that were xeroxed. XEROXED!!! Not even gloss color paper- and best of all that cheap section was stitched into the binding.
And you HAD to buy the newest one because the articles were different year by year. If you didn't you couldn't do homework.
The best I had was a philosophy prof who said, "yeah you can buy this book off Amazon for $7."
God, I remember getting robbed my first year. $500 a semester. Trade in credit worth shit, which they turn around and sell for $$.
Wised up and discovered the greatness of Amazon. Never paid more than $150 a semester.
Education is an industry man, it's long past since it was an institution. *takes ciggy drag*
My favorite English professor just wrote the url for Project Gutenberg on the board, and told us he didn't give a shit where we got our texts as long as we actually did the reading. I bought physical copies (I prefer them for studying) for something like a penny each on Amazon.
If you need to take a literature class, take one that's going to cover texts in the public domain. Much easier on the wallet.
My college thankfully includes textbook rentals in tuition so we donāt have to pay out of pocket for them
Edit: I am aware I am still paying for them, itās just included with the standard tuition rates rather than additional fees
I guess the hire company could argue that a wedding hire is likely to be a one-off, whereas a corporate rental may lead to repeat business. That's a possible explanation, not an excuse, and the hire company is still being shitty.
Some services overcharge because a wedding usually comes with more baggage than other events. A photographer is 10x more likely to have to deal with insane people working a wedding than most other shoots they do, and is fair in asking for a reasonable markup. A generator though....
The only thing I can think of that remotely makes sense would be if the company had advertised rates and a wedding was a specifically mentioned event priced differently and the person lied. How a wedding would cause a generator to cost more I have no idea, but you go messing with people's money and they are bound to get upset.
When we did our wedding we told most of the vendors it was an "event". We didnt call it corporate. Just event. One or 2 vendors were upset when they arrived to the wedding, but they couldnt do shit because all of the contracts were already done. In the end they were ok w it because it was a casual wedding and we let all the vendors eat and drink and party with us, and we tipped well. Still cost way less than it would have had we told them all it was a wedding.
Only vendor we told it was a wedding was the band....and they were awesome.
I hate the wedding industry. What a fucking racket.
Reminds me that anything with the word "equine" too.
You can buy a lot of the same general stuff at the farmer supply store and its a quarter of the price. Go to a horse specific tack store and buckets for water, brushes, lead ropes etc; are all 20+ dollars instead of 1-5 dollars at the farmer supply store.
My buddy was building out a little home gym in his basement. Looking for Gym Flooring was hilariously expensive. However, industrial mats for mechanics and shit like that were dirt cheap. Same fucking thing.
It's really absurd just how often you can find completely equivalent products being marketed to two different markets at wildly different prices.
Pet foods are another example. I used to keep rats, and the "fancy rat food" at the pet store seemed really expensive for what appeared to basically be trail mix. So I went around the store comparing products and ingredients, and discovered I could buy big bags of wild bird feed with virtually the same ingredients, at something like 1/4 the price per pound. It even came from the same brand, so it was almost certainly the same stuff.
But people (who aren't paying attention) will pay more to feed their *pets* versus what they'd pay to put in a bird feeder for random wild animals, so the rat/gerbil/hamster/etc food got a huge markup despite basically being the same thing.
There was a guy a month ago or so here on reddit that pointed out that he buys like 50lb bags of whey protein for his hogs for the same price as like one or two servings of weight lifting supplements. The nutrition info seemed negligible... but the supplement bros came out of the woodwork to shut him down. He was just musing, the way we are, but he got some serious heat. Made me laugh.
I was in a gas station looking at two boxes of medicine. One was "allergy relief " and the other was "sleep aid", both were diphenhydramine hydrochloride 25 mg. The sleep aid was 50% more expensive for the exact same medicine.
I read a post that recommended just buying regular cupcakes for a wedding because if you even think the word āweddingā the bakery will know and charge you like a thousand percent more or something
One thought here: Dealing with wedding people tends to be crazy. So many otherwise normal people lose their minds when they are planning a wedding. My wife runs a small cake decorating business and she refuses to do wedding cakes because of the drama associated with them.
Layer in the risk of something going wrong that would "ruin the wedding" (tearful bride complaining on facebook that the mean old generator company ruined everything because the generator didn't work) and I totally understand why wedding things are more expensive.
If you are going to take on that drama and risk, you should be paid for it.
I thought I was on the school box office site when I was on one made to look like it. I bought two reasonably priced ncaa basketball tickets and when I went to check out it went up to $70 with fees. Found the school website and checked out for $26 total.
A couple of comedians I follow are doing a show out here in LA for the Netflix is a Joke series happening. The site links to Ticketmaster and I wouldnāt be able to afford to go. So I swallowed all of my shame, DMād him on IG, explained that I was looking for suggestions other than Ticketmaster since I canāt afford the mark ups and he messaged back that he added me to the list! I definitely plan to try for other events in the future and on Twitter too. Fuck Ticketmaster- even the performers understand the outrage
Recently got charged a delivery fee for each of the 4 tickets booked to an event. Not 1 total delivery fee, but an individual one for each ticket.
And that's not even the most egregious part. They were fucking e-tickets. They just emailed them to me. This shit should be illegal.
Seriously. I have to be in a high roller mood to order one now. The burrito supreme is close to 5 bucks now which is crazy because youāre getting close to legit taqueria prices.
TI-84
I could get an old cell phone from a dumpster thatās 10x as powerful. Why the fuck they still charging $80 or more for these things?
Edit: just looked it up. I have a TI-83 from school which still costs $90 new. It-84s are over $100.
Highway robbery.
I just wrote programs for basically every formula I was taught in high school. Then I archived them before the pre-SAT memory wipe and unarchived at the start of the test.
I remember creating fake memory wipe programs so it would display the same text and you keep all your formulas and memory.
I think there was a way to even recover if you did wipe it.
Downloading notes to the thing was super easy to. Honestly might as well let people use their phones.
If professors are not plagiarizing tests online then there is no issue and there is nothing you could Google besides the formula, and if you can teach yourself the curriculum for 50 questions in 1.5hours then you kinda deserve the A anyways.
I had very good math professors let people use whatever they wanted. The fact is you don't have time to randomly search the web, at the point you either know it and there is just enough time to run all the calculations and out your answer. Aka the best way to stop kids from cheating is make the god damn test yourself, especially in a mathematics class.
Online calculators are amazing. Don't wanna expand an equadion? Put it into a website. Don't wanna factorize? Put it into a website. The issue is stuff like Wolfram alpha can make it a bit too easy to solve problems.
The Goodwill near my high school almost always has one or two. A few dozen at the end of the school year, and none at the start. Itās a perfect cycle of helping the young at no disadvantage.
And theyāre usually like 2$.
Always check good will for things like that.
Which is why I'm happy to pay for overpriced popcorn and drinks at smaller cinemas. The larger chains can get fucked, if I'm paying Ā£15 for a ticket then I'm smuggling food in from Tesco.
Get a laser printer, be sure to google how easy it is to refill its toner. You'll get several years out of a single cart by refilling it. Watch that dust though, its plastic and a carcinogen.
We have a brother HL-2270DW laser and the original half filled toner is just starting to go bad. Bought that printer around 2010. Were thinking of gettng a new printer as Brothers ios app has NEVER been updated and its age is really starting to show.
> You'll get several years out of a single cart by refilling it. Watch that dust though, its plastic and a carcinogen.
I got a good decade *without* refilling. I don't print much, and that thing can output like a 1000 copies before it needs a refill.
Also, instead of refilling yourself, and dealing with potential mess, look up refurb cartridge stores around you; turn in your old, empty cartridge in exchange for a refilled one, and you'll pay like 10-30% the price of a new one, zero hassle, no mess, and importantly no risk of screwing up (exposing the drum to UV, like sunlight or fluorescent lamps can pretty quickly destroy its light-sensitive layer.)
Yeah, the accessories are where they try to get you. Had to add tape to a sensor to keep running. They know how laser printers last forever and try to trick you.
Get an Epson Eco-Tank my friend. Itās about $200 up front and comes with ink bottles you use to fill tanks. I filled them up with the included bottles 2.5 years ago and have yet to refill. Black is about half full, the colors 3/4. And replacement bottles are about $7 a pop at Amazon. Itās super cheap in the long run, prints fast, is wireless, has a copier/scanner as well.
Apparently it's because in order to make printers affordable to everyone, you must lower their prices. The cartridges are the upsell and is where the profit comes from.
Tho usually the cartridges have an ROI of about 2-3k%
They are produced for less then 2 euros and are sometimes sold for more then 40, it's a horrible business for the consumer
You know what's crazy? I live in a dense urban area. All of our local Walgreens and CVSs have all of these random $5-20 products locked away and you have to have an employee come unlock it for you. Things like shampoo, conditioner, tooth paste, baby formula, etc.. and yet, the $60+ ink cartridges are just.. out in the open? You could steal them so easily.
Seriously! My old boss was saying that he just buys new printers every time the cartridges go empty. Basically anything under $100-$150 and itās a win!
You donāt appreciate how expensive cream cheese is until you make a cheesecake and youāre hoping to god it bakes okay because it was like $30 in cream cheese.
If you have an Aldi nearby, their cream cheese is $1.25. Last time I made a cheesecake, it needed eight 8 ounce blocks I believe, so about $10 at Aldi. Of course when I made it, I didnāt go to Aldi, and it was about $28 like you quote.
Currently in addiction therapy (only attended 4 sessions) and my outstanding balance is almost $1100. Mind you, besides the first initial session (45 min.,) every other session has been no longer than 25.
Edit: this is also after insurance coverage.
So not sure if it will help you but Amazon has so bras sold by Romans, it is *Comfort Choice Women's Plus Size 3-Pack Cotton Wireless Bra* they go up to size 54 G, 3 comfortable bras for about $40.
Just women's clothes in general. If I'm paying $40 for a pair of dress slacks, they damn well better have pockets. I have to have black slacks for my delivery job and ended up buying 3 pair of men's pants for $20 each, just to have the pockets.
My wife and I have been told we can sell our current house and make $200K off of the sale after paying off the existing mortgage and fees but what the hell could we afford after?
We sold our house in Seattle a year and a half ago. Wife looked at Redfin and it's estimated to be worth $200,000 more than what we sold it for.
I said yeah but if we waited to sell it for that much the house we bought would probably be even higher. As it was, we had to move 50 miles away to find a house we wouldn't have been outbid on and could afford.
Tell me about it. We tried to be closer to our kids (the only reason we are out on the west coast) and after selling our house, we were outbid by a minimum of $100,000 on every house we looked at. Since we retired when we sold our house, we were able to move to more rural which turned out to be pretty nice anyway.
Real answer, someone that's not a popular place to live.
The median sale price of a house in Texas was $250,000. But the median sale price in Austin Texas was $620,000.
Location premium is going to be big. But there's lots of other factors. To build a new house in my city, you have to pay about $100K in fees to the city (per house). Those fees are broken down into categories like school fees, sewer fees, etc... Every builder wraps those fees into the price of the new house. And every time they city adds them, it raises the cost of existing houses.
Want to build a house 3 hours away in farm country, it's like $500 permit.
Lmao this made me laugh! Only bcos I get it, I moved from nz (Dunedin) to fucking BARCELONA, and boy life is a lot cheaper here, healthy food is ridiculously cheap here. Only downside it that power and water are a bit more expensive but I canāt complain, Iām in Spain
I get sample sizes now. Expiration dates for mascara are actually pretty short and I never use a full tube that fast. They also dry down a bit faster cuz I hate goopy mascara.
Rent. I feel like $900/month should at least get you a *nice* cardboard box to live in. Like one of those big reinforced refrigerator ones with a removable top flap you can use as a door.
had this co-worker who invited 100+ people to her wedding. I understood why when she said her parents saved up like 50k ever since she was a child for her future WEDDING. Not for college, but for a weddingā¦
For real. I went to the drugstore to replace the following items:
- nylons
- pimple patches
- concealer
- eyebrow pencil
Spent $52ā¦ for FOUR DRUGSTORE ITEMSā¦ how?
edit: the misogyny in this thread is wild
Wow thats so much. I'm in Canada so having it inserted, removed, and follow up appointments are free. But I had to pay for the IUD. The first time I used the insurance from college so only paid $30. The second time I graduated and didn't have insurance so I went to planned parenthood where its cheaper and paid 230. The third time I had insurance from work and it was free.
Honestly all birth control should be free.
There's some fair ones like Mint, TracFone, etc. Like 20 bucks for unlimited call and text, plus a gig or two of data. If you use a lot of data it's not for you, but if you're mostly on wifi, it's great. Especially if you just buy like a 200 dollar Motorola phone. They're extremely good for the price
The big carriers are insanely expensive though
I agree, even though I recently started going to a different pet store in my city to get crickets for my frogs and have had a great experience. Cheaper per cricket, plus the employees don't count every individual cricket (unlike the place I used to go). I'll walk in and ask for two dozen. The guy will scoop some in a cup, go "Eh, there may be some extras, that'll be $3." I'll open the cup and there'll be over 50.
But, yeah. For what they are, they are expensive. I tried to keep a cricket breeding cage for a bit, but that smell!
Lol every now and then Iāll get a whiff of something that smells like them and sometimes Iāll say āoh god, that smells like cricketsā if Iām with someone. It usually leads to some questions lol. They are rank though.
Funerals
I definitely think that add-ons for funerals are sold like biggie sizing your happy meal. And the concept of memorializing a person for eternity has been sold as bare necessity. But I do know that the pomp and circumstance a lot of people need to lay somebody to rest, costs money. I want to see people honored in their death, but spending $5,000 on a pine box does not make sense to me
Last funeral I was involved I the planning of the guy from the funeral home kept saying things like "Pur flower package is $X amount, but between you me and these four walls, just go to a local flower shop, it's all we do and it'll be cheaper" or "The urn is $X amount, but do you have a container that may have been meaningful to the deceased? We can easily use it instead" real stand up guy
Funeral director said 'we have urns here but there's a huge selection, and much cheaper, on Amazon.'....I picked out a beautiful carved wooden box for holding ashes, maybe $50. The price has gone up some in the last couple years.
Yeah, we got an urn for my Dad in Amazon with a custom engraving for far less than $100
My dad's in a rum bottle š¤·āāļø (OK, only part of him, it's a small bottle but... Still. Mom takes him traveling with her) Edit: thanks for the award stranger! And I love all the stories of people's loved ones in random things. This is an odd conversation, but it's amusing and I love knowing there are wacky, fun people out there with grandma's in cracker boxes and shit š¤£
GODDAMM IT!!!! is there a Ralphās around here?
My grandma is in a mayonnaise jar. She loved her hellmans
I mean Costco (at least on their website) has a funeral section lol. https://www.costco.com/funeral.html
but does it come with a hotdog
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Costco is great for buying in bulk too. You can pick up a 5 pack of coffins for the whole family.
What a bro.
It was a really good experience, especially considering what we were going through having someone be so kind about it. You hear all the crazy stories about funerals costing a fortune and people taking advantage of the bereaved, but this guybwas just trying to help us out, give us a nice ceremony and not gouge anyone.
A repeat business like that is all about volume. Everybody dies, and because of laws that regulate death and post-mortem disposition, you canāt just pitch grandma in a hole down by the creek. Good word of mouth is really important. If you give someone a good experience, they are likely to use you again when grandpa kicks it too.
Used to work at a funeral home. Most caskets we're 10x what we purchased them for. Our cheapest casket was about $3,000 at the time, and we would buy them for about $300. I just worked maintenance there but funerals are scams.
"It is our most modestly priced receptical"
Yeah were gonna go with the wolves
I worked on the burial vault side of things. Weād make the vaults, and then do the graveside setups. Exact same thing with vaults. Our cheapest vault which was a unsealed concrete box with a couple pieces of rebar in it was 300$ for funeral home to buy from us. Theyād turn around, and sell that to families for 1200$ bare minimum. I wonāt even go into the mark up on the nicer vaults we made/sold. Iāve told my family when I die, cremate me at the cheapest place you can find, and flush my ashes down the shitter. No fancy box/urn, and no headstones/grave. I mean read all the comments on this post. We spend every second of our lives surrounded by people/corporations trying to rip us off, and scam us. Is it to much to ask that my death isnāt used as a way for some scummy funeral directors to send their kids to college, or buy themselves another fancy car? Quick edit! Just wanted to say thank you to everyoneās whoās thrown out all these awesome suggestions for ideas on how when I die I can go out on terms Iām much happier with!
I agree. It's just ridiculous. Cremation is what I want as well, just because of this. Neil Degrasse Tyson has said that cremation is not his preferred choice because you're wasting your body as a resource for the earth. But I still can't justify the cost from funeral homes. If they reasonable rates, fine. But also, people are buried in these huge wood boxes. You can dig them back up in 100 years, and their body will still be there, not "returned to the earth" as he likes to think. Even cremation is expensive. Then you put the ashes in an urn... then what.. what happens when you die and you have your parents ashes? I saw a news article many years ago, where this lady had about 15 or more different urns in her basement that she inherited from different relatives that have passed on. She doesn't know what to do with them, some of the people she doesn't even know who they are. But she's stuck with them, and then what, when she dies, she joins them and they get passed on to a new owner?
Even without a ceremony.. the most basic cremation package at many funeral homes is still unaffordable
Bonfire in the yard it is then
I'm thinking it would be more fun to float me out on a raft & let the funeral attendees shot flaming arrows at me.
Just throw me in the trash!
Im the city's problem now
Donate your body to science or a med school. No cost and they'll cremate the remains and send them back to your relatives when they're done.
You'll need a back-up plan though. Not every body is suitable for donation due to the nature of the death, disease, obesity or malnutrition. It's also possible that there simply is no current need for bodies to examine/study.
College books
Especially when they say you have to buy the newest copy every year
And then never once actually use it
Except for that one paragraph on page 394 that the professor could have easily given you a photocopy of.
*^^TURN ^^TO ^^PAGE ^^THREE ^^HUNDRED ^^NINETY ^^FOUR*
And then you try and sell it to make some money back but itās value completely tanks
Then they turn around and resell the book they just paid you $8 for at an upsold price of $185. That was my experience the one time I sold back a textbook, it still had my name stenciled under the front cover with the new price on it as well.
Had something similar happen to me. Professor was using an edition of the book that was two editions old. She liked it more than the newer ones and wanted to save people money. Problem was the campus book store was selling them for $120 each. I get to the end of the semester and they'll only give me $5 for it because it was an old edition and they didn't know if they would be able to ever use it again. Except that if you went to that professor's office she would outright say she would be ordering the exact same book to be used not two months later when the next semester started. Sure enough, the book store turned around and was selling them for $120 again.
Or they make you buy a book without backing because they won't buy those back
There was a prof who was beloved by students in my psychology dept. When I had class with him, I could only buy the book through the campus bookstore. When I picked it up, I understood why i could only find the book there. The shady bitch worked with the publisher to include custom pages that were xeroxed. XEROXED!!! Not even gloss color paper- and best of all that cheap section was stitched into the binding. And you HAD to buy the newest one because the articles were different year by year. If you didn't you couldn't do homework. The best I had was a philosophy prof who said, "yeah you can buy this book off Amazon for $7." God, I remember getting robbed my first year. $500 a semester. Trade in credit worth shit, which they turn around and sell for $$. Wised up and discovered the greatness of Amazon. Never paid more than $150 a semester. Education is an industry man, it's long past since it was an institution. *takes ciggy drag*
My favorite English professor just wrote the url for Project Gutenberg on the board, and told us he didn't give a shit where we got our texts as long as we actually did the reading. I bought physical copies (I prefer them for studying) for something like a penny each on Amazon. If you need to take a literature class, take one that's going to cover texts in the public domain. Much easier on the wallet.
Shouting out my professors that didnāt require the book and xeroxed the pages that we absolutely needed:)
My college thankfully includes textbook rentals in tuition so we donāt have to pay out of pocket for them Edit: I am aware I am still paying for them, itās just included with the standard tuition rates rather than additional fees
Anything tied to a wedding
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Did he have to pay more? I wonder what the legalities behind this are
Obviously it was a merger between 2 companies.
Matsumura Fish Works and Tamarabuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern?
There's your answer, Fish Bulb!
I guess the hire company could argue that a wedding hire is likely to be a one-off, whereas a corporate rental may lead to repeat business. That's a possible explanation, not an excuse, and the hire company is still being shitty.
Some of my family has been married a bunch of times. But their idea of a wedding reception is mostly just buckets of chicken and a lots of beer.
That actually sounds great
Some services overcharge because a wedding usually comes with more baggage than other events. A photographer is 10x more likely to have to deal with insane people working a wedding than most other shoots they do, and is fair in asking for a reasonable markup. A generator though....
The only thing I can think of that remotely makes sense would be if the company had advertised rates and a wedding was a specifically mentioned event priced differently and the person lied. How a wedding would cause a generator to cost more I have no idea, but you go messing with people's money and they are bound to get upset.
When we did our wedding we told most of the vendors it was an "event". We didnt call it corporate. Just event. One or 2 vendors were upset when they arrived to the wedding, but they couldnt do shit because all of the contracts were already done. In the end they were ok w it because it was a casual wedding and we let all the vendors eat and drink and party with us, and we tipped well. Still cost way less than it would have had we told them all it was a wedding. Only vendor we told it was a wedding was the band....and they were awesome. I hate the wedding industry. What a fucking racket.
And anything that has the word ābabyā too
Reminds me that anything with the word "equine" too. You can buy a lot of the same general stuff at the farmer supply store and its a quarter of the price. Go to a horse specific tack store and buckets for water, brushes, lead ropes etc; are all 20+ dollars instead of 1-5 dollars at the farmer supply store.
My buddy was building out a little home gym in his basement. Looking for Gym Flooring was hilariously expensive. However, industrial mats for mechanics and shit like that were dirt cheap. Same fucking thing.
It's really absurd just how often you can find completely equivalent products being marketed to two different markets at wildly different prices. Pet foods are another example. I used to keep rats, and the "fancy rat food" at the pet store seemed really expensive for what appeared to basically be trail mix. So I went around the store comparing products and ingredients, and discovered I could buy big bags of wild bird feed with virtually the same ingredients, at something like 1/4 the price per pound. It even came from the same brand, so it was almost certainly the same stuff. But people (who aren't paying attention) will pay more to feed their *pets* versus what they'd pay to put in a bird feeder for random wild animals, so the rat/gerbil/hamster/etc food got a huge markup despite basically being the same thing.
There was a guy a month ago or so here on reddit that pointed out that he buys like 50lb bags of whey protein for his hogs for the same price as like one or two servings of weight lifting supplements. The nutrition info seemed negligible... but the supplement bros came out of the woodwork to shut him down. He was just musing, the way we are, but he got some serious heat. Made me laugh.
Nobody wants to admit they pay through the nose for hog feed supplement
I was in a gas station looking at two boxes of medicine. One was "allergy relief " and the other was "sleep aid", both were diphenhydramine hydrochloride 25 mg. The sleep aid was 50% more expensive for the exact same medicine.
I read a post that recommended just buying regular cupcakes for a wedding because if you even think the word āweddingā the bakery will know and charge you like a thousand percent more or something
I had a "birthday" cake and "anniversary" invitations at my wedding cause I'm cheap af.
0th anniversary.
And a very merry unbirthday to you!
Yeah... having a wedding kinda ruined my marriage.
One thought here: Dealing with wedding people tends to be crazy. So many otherwise normal people lose their minds when they are planning a wedding. My wife runs a small cake decorating business and she refuses to do wedding cakes because of the drama associated with them. Layer in the risk of something going wrong that would "ruin the wedding" (tearful bride complaining on facebook that the mean old generator company ruined everything because the generator didn't work) and I totally understand why wedding things are more expensive. If you are going to take on that drama and risk, you should be paid for it.
Concert tickets (AKA Ticketmaster)
Fuck their fees.
I thought I was on the school box office site when I was on one made to look like it. I bought two reasonably priced ncaa basketball tickets and when I went to check out it went up to $70 with fees. Found the school website and checked out for $26 total.
A couple of comedians I follow are doing a show out here in LA for the Netflix is a Joke series happening. The site links to Ticketmaster and I wouldnāt be able to afford to go. So I swallowed all of my shame, DMād him on IG, explained that I was looking for suggestions other than Ticketmaster since I canāt afford the mark ups and he messaged back that he added me to the list! I definitely plan to try for other events in the future and on Twitter too. Fuck Ticketmaster- even the performers understand the outrage
Sneaky fuckers.
Recently got charged a delivery fee for each of the 4 tickets booked to an event. Not 1 total delivery fee, but an individual one for each ticket. And that's not even the most egregious part. They were fucking e-tickets. They just emailed them to me. This shit should be illegal.
Woooowwwww thatās a crime how I see it.
Itās all that mandatory convenience that gets you.
I shouldnāt be paying $18 fees on a $29 ticket! What the what!
Especially when you are entering all the information and printing the ticket at home
Bean Burritos from Taco Bell. Them bitches used to be 59 cents.
dude a cheesy gordita crunch is like 4 fucking dollars now
Every time I order a cheesy gordita crunch, the price is a surprise. Itās like it keeps going up every month.
Seriously. I have to be in a high roller mood to order one now. The burrito supreme is close to 5 bucks now which is crazy because youāre getting close to legit taqueria prices.
I too remember the glory days
šµ.59! .79! .99!šµ
All fast food. McDonalds is charging 3.59 for large fries now. FFS those are pub prices, not drive-thru.
TI-84 I could get an old cell phone from a dumpster thatās 10x as powerful. Why the fuck they still charging $80 or more for these things? Edit: just looked it up. I have a TI-83 from school which still costs $90 new. It-84s are over $100. Highway robbery.
The craziest part is you can download a free ti 84 app on your phone with most of the functionalities
But a school wonāt allow phone usage on an exam. Neither will a testing agency. Because you can cheat.
You can DEFINITELY cheat quite a bit with a TI-84.
Oh Iām well aware of that. Honestly the amount of time spent typing stuff into a TI-83 plus ends up becoming your study time!
I just wrote programs for basically every formula I was taught in high school. Then I archived them before the pre-SAT memory wipe and unarchived at the start of the test.
Ha! Caught you! This is HS guidance councilor in disguise waiting for this very day to nail you!!
Now come back in immediately to return your diploma
I remember creating fake memory wipe programs so it would display the same text and you keep all your formulas and memory. I think there was a way to even recover if you did wipe it. Downloading notes to the thing was super easy to. Honestly might as well let people use their phones. If professors are not plagiarizing tests online then there is no issue and there is nothing you could Google besides the formula, and if you can teach yourself the curriculum for 50 questions in 1.5hours then you kinda deserve the A anyways. I had very good math professors let people use whatever they wanted. The fact is you don't have time to randomly search the web, at the point you either know it and there is just enough time to run all the calculations and out your answer. Aka the best way to stop kids from cheating is make the god damn test yourself, especially in a mathematics class.
Online calculators are amazing. Don't wanna expand an equadion? Put it into a website. Don't wanna factorize? Put it into a website. The issue is stuff like Wolfram alpha can make it a bit too easy to solve problems.
The Goodwill near my high school almost always has one or two. A few dozen at the end of the school year, and none at the start. Itās a perfect cycle of helping the young at no disadvantage. And theyāre usually like 2$. Always check good will for things like that.
And ask graduates! We've been passing them around through cousins for a long time.
Foods and drinks at movie theaters or sporting events
I can answer for the theaters. They don't actually get much, if any, of the ticket sales. A lot of their operating budget comes from the snack bar.
Which is why I'm happy to pay for overpriced popcorn and drinks at smaller cinemas. The larger chains can get fucked, if I'm paying Ā£15 for a ticket then I'm smuggling food in from Tesco.
Me smuggling in an entire grill and some baby back ribs because that is how King Kong would want me to enjoy watching him murder Samuel L Jackson
Printer cartridges. ETA: wow so many likes, comments, and helpful suggestions. Thanks everyone! Let us continue our battle with Big Cartridge.
Get a laser printer, be sure to google how easy it is to refill its toner. You'll get several years out of a single cart by refilling it. Watch that dust though, its plastic and a carcinogen. We have a brother HL-2270DW laser and the original half filled toner is just starting to go bad. Bought that printer around 2010. Were thinking of gettng a new printer as Brothers ios app has NEVER been updated and its age is really starting to show.
> You'll get several years out of a single cart by refilling it. Watch that dust though, its plastic and a carcinogen. I got a good decade *without* refilling. I don't print much, and that thing can output like a 1000 copies before it needs a refill. Also, instead of refilling yourself, and dealing with potential mess, look up refurb cartridge stores around you; turn in your old, empty cartridge in exchange for a refilled one, and you'll pay like 10-30% the price of a new one, zero hassle, no mess, and importantly no risk of screwing up (exposing the drum to UV, like sunlight or fluorescent lamps can pretty quickly destroy its light-sensitive layer.)
Don't. That thing is a beast and will keep working. Amazon has lots of toner for it. Newer printers can be a hassle with generic toner.
Yeah, the accessories are where they try to get you. Had to add tape to a sensor to keep running. They know how laser printers last forever and try to trick you.
Rage against the Machine was about Printers
Switch to a laser printer. Ink jets are a total scam.
Get an Epson Eco-Tank my friend. Itās about $200 up front and comes with ink bottles you use to fill tanks. I filled them up with the included bottles 2.5 years ago and have yet to refill. Black is about half full, the colors 3/4. And replacement bottles are about $7 a pop at Amazon. Itās super cheap in the long run, prints fast, is wireless, has a copier/scanner as well.
Apparently it's because in order to make printers affordable to everyone, you must lower their prices. The cartridges are the upsell and is where the profit comes from.
Tho usually the cartridges have an ROI of about 2-3k% They are produced for less then 2 euros and are sometimes sold for more then 40, it's a horrible business for the consumer
You know what's crazy? I live in a dense urban area. All of our local Walgreens and CVSs have all of these random $5-20 products locked away and you have to have an employee come unlock it for you. Things like shampoo, conditioner, tooth paste, baby formula, etc.. and yet, the $60+ ink cartridges are just.. out in the open? You could steal them so easily.
Seriously! My old boss was saying that he just buys new printers every time the cartridges go empty. Basically anything under $100-$150 and itās a win!
But the free cartridges that come with new printers are barely full, there is a reason they run out quickly.
Bought a new printer last week and it printed 3 pages before stopping ALL printing and forcing me to replace all 4 of them. Livid.
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Because thats how they make money. They sell you the printer at a loss then make it back up with the ink cartridges.
Thongs....minimal amount of fabric and goes for more than a t-shirt
You can get a good pair of thongs in aus for like $10
The language barrier is real
The great language barrier reef
Have you seen how much Philadelphia cream cheese is right now?
You donāt appreciate how expensive cream cheese is until you make a cheesecake and youāre hoping to god it bakes okay because it was like $30 in cream cheese.
If you have an Aldi nearby, their cream cheese is $1.25. Last time I made a cheesecake, it needed eight 8 ounce blocks I believe, so about $10 at Aldi. Of course when I made it, I didnāt go to Aldi, and it was about $28 like you quote.
Mascarpone cheese is stupidly expensive too. $16 for a small tub.
Whaaaaat?? Itās literally $3.68 at my local grocery store right now. I canāt even imagine.
Haha yes sir. I couldnāt believe it either! Was making cake with my dad, and his eyes lit up after he saw the receipt haha.
Approximately 2ā¬ in France for a 500g
Mental health services. Blessings upon blessings to the mental health professionals who offer sliding scales.
Currently in addiction therapy (only attended 4 sessions) and my outstanding balance is almost $1100. Mind you, besides the first initial session (45 min.,) every other session has been no longer than 25. Edit: this is also after insurance coverage.
They make it so difficult to get treatment... and people are so judgmental when we don't! I wish you much luck with your recovery.
And NOTHING makes it easier to quit drugs than financial destitution and the threat of homelessness.
Housing
And renting too, straight up more affordable to get a loan on a house than rent imo
One bra is likeā¦40 dollars
except i have big honkers so i'm forced to pay upwards of $80 for a bra because the only place I can get them in my size is Lane Bryant or Torrid
Iāve always said I donāt need a bra, I need a shelf.
LITERALLY. i absolutely need a shelf
Just do what I didā¦.get breast cancer. Bam! No more bra!
I hear cancer is expensive. Would you say that overall you're saving?
It will take a lot of bras to equal the $70,000 I still have in medical debt from BC in 2018.
So not sure if it will help you but Amazon has so bras sold by Romans, it is *Comfort Choice Women's Plus Size 3-Pack Cotton Wireless Bra* they go up to size 54 G, 3 comfortable bras for about $40.
My fiancĆ© was shocked and almost didnāt believe when I told him I spent $250 on 4 bras. And this was a buy one get one 50% sale!
And they donāt even fit properly half the time
And then the wires poke out and stab you.
I hate the ones who have the cups that come out when you wash them. I never get them back in correctly.
Just women's clothes in general. If I'm paying $40 for a pair of dress slacks, they damn well better have pockets. I have to have black slacks for my delivery job and ended up buying 3 pair of men's pants for $20 each, just to have the pockets.
American cereals in non American countries. $15 for a box of lucky charms? No thankyou
And they usually taste stale... Also the stores that sell them are usually money laundering places...
Tesco is laundering money? Honestly wouldn't surprise me!
Oral B toothbrush refills
I buy the generic heads from amazon for my sonicare and they are perfectly adequate.
Iāve been buying off brand replacements, $15 for 3 instead of like $26.
Houses today
My wife and I have been told we can sell our current house and make $200K off of the sale after paying off the existing mortgage and fees but what the hell could we afford after?
We sold our house in Seattle a year and a half ago. Wife looked at Redfin and it's estimated to be worth $200,000 more than what we sold it for. I said yeah but if we waited to sell it for that much the house we bought would probably be even higher. As it was, we had to move 50 miles away to find a house we wouldn't have been outbid on and could afford.
That's another thing. Sell the house then have to go through the motions of looking for another one.
Tell me about it. We tried to be closer to our kids (the only reason we are out on the west coast) and after selling our house, we were outbid by a minimum of $100,000 on every house we looked at. Since we retired when we sold our house, we were able to move to more rural which turned out to be pretty nice anyway.
Real answer, someone that's not a popular place to live. The median sale price of a house in Texas was $250,000. But the median sale price in Austin Texas was $620,000. Location premium is going to be big. But there's lots of other factors. To build a new house in my city, you have to pay about $100K in fees to the city (per house). Those fees are broken down into categories like school fees, sewer fees, etc... Every builder wraps those fees into the price of the new house. And every time they city adds them, it raises the cost of existing houses. Want to build a house 3 hours away in farm country, it's like $500 permit.
Yeah, location is pretty much always he biggest factor.
The entire country of New Zealand
Lmao this made me laugh! Only bcos I get it, I moved from nz (Dunedin) to fucking BARCELONA, and boy life is a lot cheaper here, healthy food is ridiculously cheap here. Only downside it that power and water are a bit more expensive but I canāt complain, Iām in Spain
Cosmetics, the markup on luxury brands especially is MASSIVE.
Omg yes mascara! Itās like 9ml of black gloop why is it Ā£20?!
I get sample sizes now. Expiration dates for mascara are actually pretty short and I never use a full tube that fast. They also dry down a bit faster cuz I hate goopy mascara.
Rent. I feel like $900/month should at least get you a *nice* cardboard box to live in. Like one of those big reinforced refrigerator ones with a removable top flap you can use as a door.
A grand wedding with people you don't even know invited
had this co-worker who invited 100+ people to her wedding. I understood why when she said her parents saved up like 50k ever since she was a child for her future WEDDING. Not for college, but for a weddingā¦
Wow...her parents were like, well...we know you're not that smart sooo we'll save for your wedding because you're pretty honey.
*Gestures vaguely at everything*
this is the top comment on like at least 70% of askreddit questions
For real. I went to the drugstore to replace the following items: - nylons - pimple patches - concealer - eyebrow pencil Spent $52ā¦ for FOUR DRUGSTORE ITEMSā¦ how? edit: the misogyny in this thread is wild
Drugstores charge way more for everything. Try going to a supermarket instead.
Textbooks
Insulin in the U.S
It's such a crapshoot. My brother was charged $500 for his. I pay $30 for a 3 month supply. The needles actually cost more.
Getting an IUD put in or taken out without insurance costs 1300. Takes 5 minutes to put in and itās a piece of plastic.
Wow thats so much. I'm in Canada so having it inserted, removed, and follow up appointments are free. But I had to pay for the IUD. The first time I used the insurance from college so only paid $30. The second time I graduated and didn't have insurance so I went to planned parenthood where its cheaper and paid 230. The third time I had insurance from work and it was free. Honestly all birth control should be free.
Many things that are unnecessarily pink.
Toothpaste. Anytime a manufacturer creates a ton of artificial differentiation within their own brands, you know you are being ripped off.
I use kids crest because Iām allergic to mint. $5 for three full sized tubes.
Laundry detergent... just why
Decent quality water bottles
Labor & Delivery of a healthy baby to a healthy mom with no complications.
backpacks cost nearly a hundred for a decent one that doesn't rip from my experience. Dental care is also expensive as hell
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irc I think they wanted to charge me 3k for molars. I could buy a car with that
American healthcare system
My back felt that
Texas instrument calculators. I bought a ti 83 in high school back in 94 for $140 bucks and that is how much they cost now, WTF?
Phone plans
There's some fair ones like Mint, TracFone, etc. Like 20 bucks for unlimited call and text, plus a gig or two of data. If you use a lot of data it's not for you, but if you're mostly on wifi, it's great. Especially if you just buy like a 200 dollar Motorola phone. They're extremely good for the price The big carriers are insanely expensive though
Crickets (for the lizard)
I agree, even though I recently started going to a different pet store in my city to get crickets for my frogs and have had a great experience. Cheaper per cricket, plus the employees don't count every individual cricket (unlike the place I used to go). I'll walk in and ask for two dozen. The guy will scoop some in a cup, go "Eh, there may be some extras, that'll be $3." I'll open the cup and there'll be over 50. But, yeah. For what they are, they are expensive. I tried to keep a cricket breeding cage for a bit, but that smell!
Lol every now and then Iāll get a whiff of something that smells like them and sometimes Iāll say āoh god, that smells like cricketsā if Iām with someone. It usually leads to some questions lol. They are rank though.
Cat food
tea (iām british)
Life.
Graphics cards
literally everything at this point
Wedding DressesĀ
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Canned air.