Buying a soda today costs more than twenty years ago. It’s not like the soda company had to raise prices to pay for all its innovation. The soda company usually raises prices for two reasons: to pay more for ingredients and to pay more to stock owners. This means customers pay a little bit more for each transaction. In my opinion, it’s f…. As my grandmother would describe it: “I’ve got some choice words.” I really don’t see literally paying a fee to shareholders as intrinsic to business. Indeed, I was under the impression that the business’s role was to make things less expensive for buyers. Somewhere along the line this has gotten twisted.
The only solution is to get really granular visibility on all your expenditures. If you don’t, companies will continue to erode your purchasing power bit by bit — one “convenience” fee at a time. Maybe ~20-30+ years ago, shoot — maybe even ~10 years ago, companies generally behaved ethically and honestly. Then, somewhat recently, companies — and many individuals — began acting dishonestly, to the degree that engaging in any consumer interaction at all is a risky endeavor. The best way to persevere throughout this time of widespread dishonesty and seeming absence of ethics is to develop the skills necessary to identify it when folks try to manipulate you and learn how to resist it. I personally don’t think it’s worth getting irritated by these sorts of things, because most people don’t even understand they have begun behaving dishonestly for cash. In my opinion, being angry at people for engaging in duplicitous business practices is essentially like getting angry at weather.
During a time like this, I believe the best thing you can do is learn as much as you can. Fortunately, public libraries are still free. Go get books there — they probably are connected to other libraries so that you can get books via inter-library loans. Also, librarians tend to be quite knowledgeable about books: ask questions, get answers, expand your horizons, and whatnot. Whatever comes next, you gotta get ready for it. Learning can help you prepare a stable foundation prepared for a lot of scams heading your way. You are not simply looking for stories or fiction or entertainment. You are looking for things like logic and persuasion techniques and all the other things sellers and marketers mention. One that comes to mind is NLP — Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I first saw this term decades ago in the context of seducing women. Whenever I saw NLP mentioned, I took it as a sign to go to bed. When I was like twenty-five, I wanted to like be desirable and impressive and attractive to women, not to like trick them with language. Damn! It seems that over the past twenty years, the strategy has spread. Now, it’s sold as a good idea that you should manipulate prospective customers like how you should manipulate mates. Honestly, that is basically one of the stupidest ideas I can even imagine, but I want to know what folks are trying, so I can know to avoid it.
Back to the initial point — and sorta libraries, too — I like reading about finance because it’s helpful to understand costs as they relate to money made by governments. So sodas are more expensive today than when I was a kid. Does the soda even cost more, or is the money less valuable, making it seem more expensive? This subject is actually extremely interesting to me, because what it quickly reminds you is that here on earth, everything is defined by something else. Like, ultimately, gold only has value because it’s relatively scarce and has a lineage of being used as a store of value. And what is valuable, anyway? If you were starving, you’d trade gold for food. Everything is relative everything else. In dollars, prices are rising, but with another measuring stick, like gold, prices have fallen over decades. The only thing we know for certain is that you can navigate better if you are more knowledgeable.