That probably sounds a little antiquated at this day and age.
\nIn the good old days after money was invented but before credit and contracts were,\u00a0if you wanted something, you went to somebody selling what you wanted, and you gave them some money and they\u00a0gave you some stuff. A thing. Something tangible.
\nThen you went to work where you performed some service or provided use of a skill\u00a0or something like that and you got paid money for your effort.\u00a0You then took this money and went to the store and you bought more things.
\nSo the cycle goes. Or went.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, it’s harder to buy things with money. And I don’t mean cash versus\u00a0credit and debit cards, I mean COD. Cash On Delivery. You pay money, you get something, that’s it.\u00a0Remember that?\u00a0You provide money and the other party in the exchange provides a service or goods.<\/p>\n
There’s less and less of that nowadays, and more and more of the subscription\u00a0service or contract, or leasing going on.
\nAnd it’s gotten to the point where it’s difficult to just plain buy something.<\/p>\n
The most obvious common example is the ubiquitous cell phone.
\nThey’ll give it to you for a dollar if you sign a contract promising them X amount of\u00a0future dollars over the next N years. In the short run, you get a phone for almost nothing
\nout of pocket, and in the long run, the phone company makes a profit off of all the money you\u00a0promised them, including a clause saying if you bail early, you basically have to pay for the phone.<\/p>\n
Sure you can still buy a phone outright without a contract, but is far less common, and there are less\u00a0good deals to be had this way because there’s so little turnover with this type of transaction, thus little competition, so no deals.\u00a0You can only get a deal if you sign the contract.<\/p>\n
Another one I mentioned recently is domain names. You can’t even buy a domain name. You can only rent it.\u00a0They say you’re buying the domain name, but you’re only buying it for a year or two at a time, they take it\u00a0back if you don’t pay the protection money.<\/p>\n
Internet service and cell phone service are much the same way, you don’t pay for what you use, you pay\u00a0a flat monthly fee for some limited-all-you-can-eat-up-to-a-certain-point service.\u00a0Again, there are some pay as you go plans, but I find they’re getting less and less worthwhile as they\u00a0keep raising the prices to make them comparable with or more expensive than the flat contract fee.<\/p>\n
But all that is piddly in comparison to my next example. The one that really gets my goat is home heating\u00a0oil boiler service contracts.<\/p>\n
I simply can not get somebody to come to my house any time day or night to fix my boiler unless I have an\u00a0oil delivery contract AND a boiler service contract.
\nThere are some places that will sell me oil COD which is nice. But any place that offers service requires that\u00a0you have an oil delivery contract with them.
\nWhy? Because they lose money on the service contract.
\nWell here’s a dumb idea: don’t sell something that loses you money. It’s bad for business.
\nI know, you have to compete with everybody else who is racing to the bottom of the service pool.<\/p>\n
It’s amazing to me that everybody’s gotten so caught up in this make a deal via contract to lock you in
\nso that it’s hard to switch to the competition, that it’s actually becoming hard not to do it that way.<\/p>\n
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That probably sounds a little antiquated at this day and age. In the good old days after money was invented but before credit and contracts were,\u00a0if you wanted something, you went to somebody selling what you wanted, and you gave them some money and they\u00a0gave you some stuff. A thing. Something tangible. Then you went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}