Today’s Hottest Commodities Are Monthly Services You Don’t Use, Overpay For, or Get No Real Value From

Enough is enough and people should demand better.

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

I had to block Google as a merchant from my CashApp card for constantly trying to charge me obscure amounts ranging from 38 cents to $43, for services I’m not even aware they’re trying to charge me for, because I don’t use them, and therefore definitely don’t need them.

This isn’t a Google hit piece, as a company I actually genuinely respect them and I use an endless array of their free apps and products.

This piece is about how we’re constantly being grifted by big digital businesses and brick-and-mortar ones on a regular basis — and yet nobody seems to mind. We’re not fully absolved in this matter, I won’t pretend to know the percentages but what I do know is a staggering amount of people my age don’t read their bank statements. At least not closely enough.

And speaking of banks, the overdraft fees, hidden charges, interest rates, and late fees they and credit card companies hit us with every month, should be considered criminal. I mean actual mobsters have been sent to prison for charging the kinds of interest rates some banks and credit card companies do when it’s all said and done. The difference of course is when banks and credit card companies do it, it’s called business but when citizens of any kind do it though, it's a felony known as loan sharking which usually ends up in indictments via RICO charges.

How many streaming services are you paying for right now that you don’t use, or at least use enough to get your money's worth? Are you paying for a gym membership, but haven’t been there since Obama was President? Many people, especially Americans, are. It’s what we do. We are a nation of waste mongers. We waste our money, our time, our food, and endless other assets and valuables.

Sadly, it doesn’t stop with our own negligence or failure of Government regulation. There are entire semi-mainstream publications solely dedicated to writing articles about obscure money allegedly owed to an even more obscure, and very small percentage of people, anywhere. They provide nothing but false hope to poor people, many of who they’re purposely directed at and marketed to, but are nowhere near qualified for the funds that even actually do exist. It's predatory, wrong — and honestly offensive to me as both a writer and a half-decent human being.

Premium versions of dating services, apps, games — and publications, in my view, are all just ways for organizations to take what’s yours and make it theirs. Ways of them trying to survive, at your expense, literally.

If you want to get rich, start a monthly subscription service that provides little to no value and market it relentlessly to the people who can afford it least. If you want to just simply save money annually, avoid most of them, for the most part.