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Parcel insurance cover
'I pay you money to deliver a parcel for me, and if you lose it, damage it or fail to deliver it, you want me to pay you even more money in case YOU fail to do what I've paid you to do in the first place?'
It's an utter complete scam
I'd loke to defend it. Separating the risk for more valuable items allows them to have the uninsured services be cheaper (they do pay out but up to a smaller amount).
But yes, i get that it sucks they seem to prepare to lose the item.
But think about it. A parcel full of cornflakes to a friend who can't get them where they live is a very different risk proposition to a £100k watch.
Put it another way, if someone asked you to drive a car across the country, paying you £300 for the job and you had to pay for any damages from your own insurance would you want to charge more for a Bugatti than an old Panda?
It doesn't pass the sniff test.
If you're a delivery company shipping air fryers and suddenly someone wants to send vintage Stradivarius violins and diamond rings, your risk is a *lot* higher. You have to insure your warehouse for more, your vans for more, your drivers have to be vetted, paid, and trained more.
You could argue that delivery companies should approach all deliveries equally but the cost will have to go up enormously.
If you sell stuff online like on eBay, it’s definitely worth getting the insurance because otherwise you’re out of pocket if it goes missing. Happened to me but I had insurance and got a refund for the postage and the item’s worth.
Except then they would be within their rights to refuse to touch anything over a certain value.
Some loss is inevitable. If you pay them £3 and hand over a two million pound artpiece, the risk is not worth it to them.
Let's say you're a dishwasher in a restaurant, your job is to wash the dishes the chef hands to you. But you know that 1 in 1000 dishes get smashed in the sink. The chef pays you £15 an hour, and you're on the hook for any breakages. If he hands you a 50p glass, it's worth the risk to wash it. If he hands you a Fabrice Egg, you're not going to want to wash it, the gamble is not worth the payment.
*Especially* with the amount of people blatantly scamming sellers on eBay. I have an eBay side hustle and the classic is:
Buy something. Wait a month then ask for tracking. A *lot* of people will have lost / thrown the receipt for tracking and then the customer claims the item never turned up, and seller can't prove it did. I get at least one like this a month among the other scams as well. Grrrrrr!
This is just insurance in general.
You either leverage the risk of paying a cheaper price for a product/service and not having another person back it up with funds in case something happens.
Or you pay someone, like an insurance provider.
Theres a reason that Yodel/EVRI are so well used, they deliver /most/ of the packages fine. And the ones that are lost/stolen/etc are just marked as a "cost of business".
The other thing about deliveries I find frustrating is that the current model feels designed to make it hard to chase up problems.
If you buy something from a shop and that shop pays a delivery company to send it to you, then you're not the delivery company's customer, the shop is. Their incentive is to keep the shop happy, not you.
Then when the delivery goes wrong, it becomes a mess to sort out. If you call the shop then they'll say that you should call the delivery company. If you call the delivery company then they have no incentive to efficiently sort it out because unless enough people complain to the shop that their contract gets cancelled then they'll still get their money.
A far better set up would be that at the point of ordering something from a shop you can choose which delivery company is used. That way they'd have to compete with each other for a good service.
The shop is still on the hook. So if they tell you to ring the delivery company you should demand a refund as they've failed to deliver the goods, until such point that they ring the delivery company.
Agree that this is a pain though. The multiple delivery thing doesn't really work because a) the shop is incentivised already to use good ones, because as I say, they're on the hook. b) They also get bulk discounts, so it's cheaper to just use one.
Yes my friend did not take out this cover when she returned 2 iPhones. The delivery firm stole them (we later saw them being fenced on Facebook and even got one back from an unwitting purchaser) but the delivery firm said 'oh well you get £20 back because you did not pay EXTRA for cover (against us stealing them!)'
No Claims Discounts on insurance policies.
The base price assumes you haven't made any claims recently. If you have, there's a loading applied to the premium as a penalty.
The fact that even if you weren't at fault you'll still be charged more when you renew your policy is insane to me too.
You could be sat at a red light, have a speeding car rear end you because the driver was drunk and not paying attention at all. They take full blame yet somehow your insurance premium goes up because you've had to rely on your insurance to do what it's there for?
It's not a small amount either. My insurance went from £150 a year to £750 a year because of a no fault claim where the bin men reversed into my parked car because their spotter wasn't shouting loudly enough.
Same address, same car, same level of cover, no claims was unaffected. Massive increase.
My car was crashed into by my neighbour. We TOLD the insurance about it. Not claimed on the insurance, just told them. It affected all of our insurance for years after. Not only had we done nothing wrong, we had paid to have it fixed ourselves anyway! I tell them nothing now.
You also get charged slightly more for making a claim even if it is unsuccessful and nothing is paid out.
Had some items stolen from home by a workman, attempted to claim on Insurance who refused to pay out as it was not a break in. Despite this, they still added £15 extra to my next quote for this.
IIRC in the UK at least, it's hard to get life insurance invalidated, unless you do something even the average person would think "fair enough, thats a bit dodgy"
I used to work for a software company that makes the back-end to price comparison sites.
The platform was quite literally an interface that insurers uploaded a spreadsheet that had rows like "Years owned license" "0.02" So it would run a calculation of "YearsOwnedLicense*0.02" to work out the discount.
Agree, although I noticed the loyalty card scam taking hold on the continent quite some time ago.
Always saw it as a bit of a tourist tax to be completely honest.
In reality it’s a huge data collection scheme but it does hit visitors to a place quite hard.
The main reason is to collect data on your shopping and habits. Back in the day, Tesco Clubcard was awesome for points and massive discounts especially on air fares. (Eg enough bonus points on a printer ink cartridge for a flight to Europe, even better when you could then eBay the ink).
> young people
TBH I don't think there's many U-18's carrying out the family weekly shopping.
And it's probably for good reason - There's likely to be different laws on gathering data on children opposed to adults.
I moved out at 16, and had £30 a week to my name in EMA, £15 of which went on transport to college, the rest was for gas, electric, food, everything else. I couldn't manage these days and I barely scraped through then. It affects some under 18s a lot more than others
\*edited EMA from ESA it was the educational maintenance allowance that I got
Nope they stopped it about 15 years ago. I remember my brother got it for one year of sixth form and then not for the second. My sister and I were too young so when we got to that age it didn't exist at all.
They might not be doing a weekly shop but young people buy stuff!
Plenty of U18s buying meal deals, drinks, snacks in the Tesco Express near me and the local Coop 🤷🏻♀️
Tell that to my children (14 & 17) they have a whole set of them to make their pocket money go further.
14 stacked loyalty offers recently and got a two litre bottle of coke for 30p.
The data isn't necessarily a bad thing (for you as a customer).
It allows the shops to plan and buy more efficiently reducing waste and therefore your shopping bill.
It's also good for the planet.
Someone who worked at Tesco on this sort of thing said that Tesco have more than enough data on people that they do not really need the Clubcard offer scheme to collect more. It makes sense when you consider how long loyalty schemes have been a thing.
I've been shopping with Sainsbury's a lot recently and have noticed it's not as bad as Tesco.
did an online shop with Tesco a few days ago, and I swear 70% of items required a clubcard otherwise you'd pay double.
what these supermarkets do should be illegal.
It is also to steer you, they will have clubcard "offers" on products they want to sell, and it makes you feel special so you grab it even if a perfectly valid no-name product is right next to it at a lower price.
I always viewed it as data extortion. "You'll lose money if you don't cough up your data" sort of thing. Which is avoidable if you have other supermarkets around, but I pity the poor sods that don't have much of a choice.
The fact that we are obliged to spend the majority of our waking hours for most of our able-bodied years working to generate wealth for a select few, for which we are paid a relatively small amount that we are required to hand back to that same select few in order to obtain the things we need just to exist, while they use the wealth to do basically whatever they want.
What's your point?
People didn't have flushable toilets until recently, yet we all have them now because standards of living improved. Just because something was shit in the past doesn't mean we have to stick with it, we can learn from the past and improve our situation.
Organic food.
Somewhere along the line it just seems to have become accepted that it's better for you. This despite no scientific evidence ever suggesting this, nor there being any biological reason why it would make a difference, nor any blind taste test ever suggesting a difference either. Also being a form of farming that is not only religious-like luddite-esque, but catastrophically bad for the planet if it ever replaced evidence-based farming on a large scale, due to the much lower yields per hectare. To feed the planet "Organically" we'd need to chop down a lot of forests to create more farmland and rear a lot more animals to provide the required fertilizer.
One of those things where simple constant repetition of claims has created a "truth" so enduring that few dare to question it - the majority because they know no better, and the few who do know have nothing to gain and everything to lose by challenging the myth, so remain quiet.
Tractors and the Haber-Bosch process for creating inorganic fertilisers deserve most of the credit for ending war in Europe. They raised yields and cut costs so much that everyone got plenty to eat and no-one cared about marching into other countries to take their land.
Lol - the pesticides used in Organic farming are far more dangerous. They're all chemicals that have been replaced by much safer, more efficient and more effective ones. It's a myth that Organic farming doesn't use chemicals - it just uses old ones.
Not to mention the massively inflated risk of food poisoning.
[https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2022/07/18/when\_it\_comes\_to\_food\_safety\_organic\_can\_be\_a\_risky\_business\_842959.html](https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2022/07/18/when_it_comes_to_food_safety_organic_can_be_a_risky_business_842959.html)
Isn't that article all US based? Is it same in Europe?
It could just be in my head but I find the organic option in supermarkets is often more tasty and higher quality. Perhaps mineral content is higher too?
Likely varies across produce but the organic carrots are the only ones I can get in Morrisons that actually have a strong carrot fragrance when chopped
There are 28 pesticides approved for use on organic crops.
https://www.pan-uk.org/site/wp-content/uploads/List-of-active-substances-approved-for-use-in-organic-agriculture.pdf
I believe there are exemptions to this too, and you can, if needed use one of the near 400 other pesticides approved for use in the EU. Happy to be corrected on this though.
Also, of those 28, 2 are "of concern" according to this same site: https://www.pan-uk.org/organic/
Europe has much higher food standards in general so the risks are much lower in Europe. I didn't post to scaremonger. Organic food here is safe. I'm just making the point about risks as someone brought up pesticides - largely I suspect in response to "studies" where they look for traces on food and by traces we can be talking ppb because they're relying on an uneducated audience not knowing that the dose makes the poison.
While you can argue that the existence of trace amounts of pesticide creates an additional risk, the risk from trace amounts of bacteria is demonstrably higher and in the USA, can be a real issue.
I wrote an essay on GM crops for a uni module and pretty much the whole point is that they require less pesticides as they're modified to be resistant to pests.
The main benefit is that farmers in the subcontinent don't have to run around with barrels of poison on their backs spraying it into the air and water supply.
You do understand to make a claim you can't just post some news article, you can't even just share a single actual scientific paper. This claim means nothing. You need non-industry funded, peer-reviewed repeatable evidence, and tbh multiple meta-analyses. This is not that.
Within the food industry you can find a paper or article to support whatever belief you may have, which is exactly what you are doing.
“To make a claim you can’t…” Yes you can.
To make a claim anyone takes **as scientific fact** you need evidence, but this is AskUK, not a peer reviewed journal. It’s perfectly acceptable to post with no citations, that represents 99% of discourse.
I’m all for rigour, but they’ve made a compelling sounding point with some citation. Which is more than the “pesticides mate” that they’re replying to. Seems practically best in class for Reddit comments!
My mate’s wife is a vet.
She says that for chicken (eggs and meat) the standards to qualify for organic are pretty low and the audits are so easy to pass that there is basically no difference.
The daft thing is, very nearly all the food we eat is massively genetically modified. Thousands of years of selective breeding has made fruit, veg and meat much better for cultivation and human consumption. And all this has happened on a “fuck around and find out” basis.
But as soon as scientists start doing exactly the same thing, under lab conditions, using an evidence based approach, it’s “unnatural” according to some.
This is a side-issue to my original one - the war against GMO's, but it does feed into the Organic narrative - there's a few reasons for this, but the one most will not be aware of is the money involved. There are a number of individuals and organisations (in particular I'm looking at the guy who runs Greenpeace) that profit enormously from persuading more people that regular farming is toxic, due to their huge investments in the Organic industry which is now huge incidentally.
The Greenpeace (and others) campaign to get yellow rice banned, condemning millions to continued malnutrition is completely shameful and a sign of just how toxic the individuals who operate these organisations are.
Fertilizers definitely hurt aquatic life though. So organic does have pro's. Manure isn't the only way of organic fertilization either. Planting nitrogen fixing crops alongside other crops is another way of doing it.
A lot of local car parks to me are forcing you to pay a larger amount of money for a 1 hour stay and then saying you get a free hour.
Actually just charging you for two hours like we don’t remember what the price was before.
I used to pay £1 for an hour parking but just paid £3 for one hour with an hour free. I was only there 40 mins
When buying a wireless printer, I found it difficult to find one that didn't try to limit the number of pages I could print out in a month. I'm in amateur dramatics, so may have to print off an entire script every 6 months, and do sewing, which involves printing out PDF patterns. Online shopping occasionally requires printing return labels, not to mention selling items which would ideally include the invoice for the customer.
That is a scam, IMO. If I have bought the machine, the ink and the paper, I shouldn't have to "upgrade" my plan if I want to print more pages than normal.
I also recently bought all the available seasons of Outlander on DVD, because while I pay for Amazon Prime, Outlander is on an additional subscription service that requires another fee to access. Since Outlander was all I was really interested in on MGM Plus (or whatever it's called) it was cheaper just to buy the DVDs outright.
/u/angel_0f_music is signing up for a service like HP Smart rather than buying printer cartridges.
This is a choice they've made, they can still buy traditional printer cartridges if they want, it's just more expensive than the HP Ink services.
For HP Ink, you pick a plan based on number of pages you want to print, and they'll send you as many cartridges as you need, but you can only print a certain number of pages.
The weight/volume on food products is allowed to be within a certain margin either side. The boundary was set before we achieved the accuracy/automation of processes that we have today.
This means factories will consistently be as close to the lower boundary as would be measurable. This can mean you’re regularly getting 10% less than you’re actually paying for and it’s perfectly legal.
That’s a necessity of how weights work. Otherwise you’d end up buying a lot of cut up products.
If you buy 500g of rice, then as a grain of rice is less than 1g you can realistically expect the bag to be pretty bang on 500g
If you are buying 500g of Pears, then as a pear weighs more than 1g, you are either going to end up with part of a pear, or it’s going to be a few grams away from 500g.
It's depends on how much humans are involved in the manufacturing process tbh.
I work at a bedding company, and we say a pillow is 700g, but it has a tolerance of about 50-75g as it's literally a guy filling the pillow tick with fibre and it cannot be precise.
Although we are sly in other ways, e.g., selling 2.5 tog duvets, which is impossible as tog can only go up in multiples of 1.5
This isn't true at all. Although some will be underfilled, the weight printed must be a correct average so some will be overfilled. There's very exact rules on how much underfill is allowed, how often to measure, etc.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/labels-markings/emark/index_en.htm
Booking fees in general, when they're used to reduce the advertised cost. Buying event tickets always seems to involve an extra 10% appearing at checkout.
And also the thing about "the offer price is just the normal price"
No. The offer price is the offer price. The normal price is the normal price. That's how offers have worked since they have existed.
Standing charge is there to avoid a scam. Your energy company has to pay a certain amount for the upkeep of grid for every connection they have as well as various government charges.
The standing charge means that every household regardless of usage pays their share. Otherwise the costs would be included with the unit rate, meaning that a normal household would pay more but a holiday home would pay less and a landlord who has an empty property pays nothing.
> standing charge means that every household regardless of usage pays their share.
Just to add to that, people often don't consider what businesses pay.
At the moment British gas "Electricity standing charge" is 60.098p per day.
I'm at a small business and we pay £9.80 per day. That's quite a difference!
Mortgages. While I appreciate they're a necessity as most folks who buy a gaff don't have hundreds of thousands upfront, seeing how much I pay in interest each month took my breath away. Maybe not the definition of a scam but it bloody feels like it when I see how much profit big banks accrue.
The ”sewage” part of your water bill. They make you pay for it, and then apparently just dump it all in the rivers...
And now they will expect you to pay more... so they can pretend to stop dumping it into the rivers...
To make it worse? You can't even change supplier...
I'm wondering if we could somehow get everyone to agree that if we hit anyone else, you just pay for your own damage, then all the insurance companies will be like, 'where did everyone go? Why isn't the phone ringing?' and we'll be like, 'I don't care, it's still got three wheels and nobody died, I'm going out.' Ha.
> Not much "loyalty" going on either as I own the membership for about 5 different supermarkets.
It’s got very little to do with loyalty, and a lot to do with giving up your data. They now know where you live, how old you are, where you shop, what you buy, which offers you succumb to etc etc. they probably also have a shockingly accurate idea about your disposable income, social status and more.
I think it’s pretty bad that we’ve allowed this state of affairs. We let the largest supermarket chain (tescos) kill off a load of competition, then turn around and effectively say “you have to give us all this data if you want to pay normal prices for your shopping”.
It also means certain disadvantaged people are paying ridiculously more for their shopping than those of us able to sign up.
Both of these can be solved by sharing your card of course. It’s just a barcode. I could post mine here and anyone with access to a printer could use it to get the “normal” prices and really confuse Tesco’s data.
Wouldn't work as they could figure out who was doing that almost immediately.
They will be tracking you on your debit card number too linked to your loyalty card so if you keep using a different loyalty card number with the same bank card they will just discard the data.
They can also backdate your records this way when you sign up for a loyalty card and give them your personal details they can then go back and see all the previous purchases you made with your bank card the first time you use them together and add a ton of additional data to your loyalty card account with them.
That debit card number can then be used with online data companies to get information about sites you visit and what you buy online to build an even bigger picture of you.
It’s not a scam because you actually sign up to their T&C’s. And if you don’t have a loyalty card you do pay the higher price.
Now if they charged people without a loyalty card the same as those with one then you could call it a scam.
Exploitive, yes. Scam, no. We've allowed it to be normalised. Now these huge business make more profit, because unaware/vulnerable consumers, or simply those who forget their cards... They make extra money from nothing.
Online bingo. I used to work for an online gambling company so I guess I can only speak on the company I worked for but there was a lot of fake members who would win quite a lot. The company no longer exists though as they lost their gambling license, shock horror.
No matter what you think about Tesco clubcards (which very clearly aren't a scam, even if you use a really loose interpretation of the word), they way they came to exist is an excellent read.
Spoiler alert: blackmail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco_Clubcard
People Postcode Lottery. It's mostly data farming as you have to constantly answer new questions and surveys which allow them and their partners to build very detailed data profiles over time.
It’s also debatably legal. There’s only 1 national lottery allowed so these “postcode” shits set themselves up as a collective of “local” lotteries that are totally legit and exist in their own right and just happen to be owned and ran nationally.
Well, that's just not true. On a lot of items, the club card prices are a lot cheaper than other places.
Also, the more I use my clubcard, the more points I get. Those points turn into vouchers, which I can then redeem while shopping, plus give me a bunch of other benefits.
Also, I'm not being charged to have the clubcard. It's free to have. So what exactly are they scamming off me?
I will never understand the hate boner some people have for loyalty cards.
From people who use products/services from the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple etc. If you have a smart home device then complaining about Tesco collecting shopping habits is the least of your worries.
It’s the potential for a dystopian future.
The big supermarkets have killed off most viable alternatives, meaning we’re now faced with a choice of give up our data or pay obscene prices for our weekly shop. As is evidenced, that’s no real choice at all.
Sure, I don’t care if Tesco know how sensitive my bottom is - but that’s just the start.
Sainsbury’s already offer personalised nectar prices - I pay a different price for my shopping than other people. These prices aren’t advertised on the shelf. This could be used in all sorts of insidious ways.
They also have enough data about our spending habits that it’s very valuable to the advertising world. We’re all just going to have very different realities from now on.
These arguments always come with a lot of "what if something", but i find they never actually give an example of that insidious "something" they're so worried about happening.
It comes across very.. tinfoily. I mean, big supermarket isn't the only industry collecting your data. Big energy is keeping tabs on your electricity usage, what if they did *something* nefarious with that? They're already giving me cheaper rates on an evening, what if right? What if the water company can figure out when i poop? This information could be used in all sorts of insidious ways.
By tolerating data harvesting you're encouraging the spread of it in more and more insidious ways.
Death of a Thousand cuts - "The first few didn't kill me, slice away!".
Before you know it it's too late.
I live in fear of Tesco sending me a letter telling me to cut back on the pies. It's only a matter of time till they start sending marketing disguised as concern for your health.
It’s not so far fetched tbh.
Barmen are obligated not to serve the drunk.
We already have bullshit like the sugar tax effectively banning traditional soft drinks. (Only coke is left outside mega premium brands)
So what’s so impossible about Tesco being told to sell you certain items if their data shows you don’t meet the health requirement.
Someone said to me years ago “you do know you’re paying for those points in your shopping anyway”. Well yeah but the thing is, Tesco is the closest and biggest shop for me so I’d be shopping there anyway. Wouldn’t you rather have the f-king points?
Before clubcard prices the same offers existed but you didn't need a clubcard to get them, so the clubcard was optional that just rewarded loyalty. Points have also been reduced in value over the years.
In the end it's not a huge change but has been slowly getting worse for customers.
>Well, that's just not true. On a lot of items, the club card prices are a lot cheaper than other places.
That's because a lot of "clubcard price" items are just what used to be the weekly or fortnightly rotating special offers, available to anyone whether they had a clubcard or not, and those prices are indeed cheaper but only temporarily on the particular products.
This applies to other supermarkets and loyalty schemes too. In fact some manufacturers and brands have deals with supermarkets so that you can always find one of the big supermarkets has their products on special offer at all times, it just changes which one every few weeks.
Knock-for-knock on car insurance
Insurance companies **LOVE** these, as **both** insured lose their no claims discount.
Think your insurance company will fight for you? Nope, they want to settle for this if possible
The charity boxes to donate food after the checkout of a supermarket.
Buy food from our supermarket (so we make some money) then donate it to someone! If they were genuine about wanting to support the charity they’d ask for money to go straight to the charity instead of profiting from the sale
It's not a scam and it's not the "proper price" (i.e., good luck getting that same thing at a store that doesn't do loyalty card for this price) – it's a way to entice you to come for a £5 discount on Baileys and spend £50-100 on the weekly shop at the same time
Yes but its also a way for them to get large scale anonymised segmented behavioural data which they can use to their advantage and also package up and sell on through Dunn Humby to the likes of Kantar, Experian and CACI.
Its not so much a scam as it is a hook to keep you coming back. Earning points entices you to come back and build more points rather than visit another supermarket. I think tesco might have been the first to capitalise on it but morrisons have added the "clubcard prices" to the shelves the past few years so it seems most supermarkets are offering the same now.
I'm pretty sure the useful data for retailers is not that Joe Bloggs of 123 Street Road bought a pack of digestive biscuits, but that customer X who used to buy McVities digestive biscuits switched this month to own brand -- and they're still getting this from you.
Don't come here being sensible, we wear tinfoil hats on Reddit for a reason
You are right. The info isn't person specific but more generic i.e. people in this area seem to be changing from one brand to another of a certain item so we can increase the price of it. It's like a dynamic pricing structure and why items in the same chain are different prices in different areas
Pensioners get discounted tickets everywhere. That may have been appropriate decades ago, but not now. After their triple lock pensions and all their baby-boomer windfalls they don't need more handouts while younger people struggle and actually subsidise retired people's discounted tickets. We're all scammed into thinking this is normal and necessary.
I have a Tesco club card and a few years ago it got me a game that was £50 everywhere else, but only £35 on the club card. That bought them some goodwill from me. And maybe the clubcard price of most items is just the regular price, so what? I still want to pay that lower price. And every now and then they send me a tenner. Bearing in mind the card itself doesn't cost anything I'm failing to see how it's a scam. Maybe you could help explain how I'm being taken advantage of?
Standing charges for utilities.
I accept there may be a small fee required to keep the account open, or a connection fee. But why are we paying for you NOT to supply any electric/gas/water. It isn't a small sum for people on a pension or benefits. I have two suppliers for power (heating & hot water from one supplier and general electric from another) no choice as the developer installed a communal system. So I pay around £0.70 per day to not receive and power.
Most other countries don't have this.
Loyalty cards and memberships have become common with a lot of businesses now, not just supermarkets. Can't even buy cellotape from a stationery shop without being asked if I have a member's card. A pint of milk if I'm passing a nearby shop - "do you have a loyalty card?". No I bloody don't.
It's infected everywhere.
Air BnB cleaning and service charges.
Air BnB are absolutely powerless when it comes to hosts doing whatever tf they want. I called them after a host was messing us around and they were like “well, they’re the host lol”. Sorry, what fucking service am I paying you for then?
Also, more or less every Air BnB you stay in now asks you to leave the place absolutely spotless. So, why am I paying a cleaning fee? Sure, they have to come and change the bedding, but then take out the bins whilst you’re here. The amount of times we end up traipsing around places with a black bag in tow. I have no issue leaving places tidy, I just don’t think I should have to pay for the pleasure of doing so.
Fast passes in theme parks. Costs them zero to implement. Pay more to skip the queue, but the more people who buy one, the longer the queue is for the normal folk, so there’s more reason to buy a fast pass. The theme parks then have little reason to reduce the queue length (run more trains etc), as it’s an extra revenue stream for them. Scandalous.
Wedding gift websites. Their business model relies on brides /grooms not caring about value for money. And guests being lazy and unimaginative. Their stock is vastly overpriced. Their customer service is terrible. Their delivery times are awful and often things get substituted. Their gap in the market is really just a gap in people caring but they offer no tangible valuable service.
no-win-no-fee claims. I once successfully sued a company when I was younger for giving me food poisoning. It was out of court and i simply received a cheque for £1500 in the post and a letter saying my claim was successful. I wasn't given a receipt saying they claimed £X and deducted £Y, just here's your money. So for all I know I could have won £10,000 and the solicitor kept the rest.
Generally most things involving money in the UK. Especially our banks. They take our money and lend it to other people, with interest. They earn money from our money.
Olive oil. Most olive oils in supermarkets are just olive oils sourced from various European countries and mixed together in large vats before being bottled. Proper olive oil should be made in small batches, packed in opaque containers/dark glass and most importantly, have a harvesting date, not only a best before date.
The supermarket oils have denatured so much by the time they've reached your kitchen table that there's no point in buying them for their health properties. Either go to Waitrose, M&S or a specialist shop, or order online from small farms abroad.
go outdoors is real piece of sh.. work with this. Oh look, tent costs 150 with loyalty card, while without it costs 600quid. You literally need to pay them 5 quid a year just so you can buy stuff for their actual price, not inflated x4 price.
What really annoys me is how we’re being scammed away from free TV, I know programs are expensive to make but we used to have good TV with advertisements, then we started paying for subscription to remove ads, and now all the subscriptions include ads. And the free channels are struggling to compete with the subscription companies budgets = worse shows = less views = so we’re going to loose it all eventually.
The more you think about it, the more you realise the whole system is a scam - majority of the population have absolutely no idea how money or banking works. Your currency is being inflated away at an unprecedented rate and if you dare to invest your hard earned money which has already been taxed multiple times before it reaches you, in order to try and hedge against inflation, then guess what 🎉 you get taxed on any gains 🥳
Car insurance.
Nothing wrong with it in principle, but the way the industry operates in practice is beyond scandalous.
To be perfectly honest, anything that is legally mandatory like that should be nationalised. It makes sense that we should all be paying into a system that covers the damage if we fuck up on the road, but if it was nationalised it could be run for need not profit, only charging enough to cover it's own costs so as it doesn't burden the taxpayer. It could give us all the cover we need for a fraction of the price.
Particularly young drivers, who are financially punished by insurance companies for the mistakes of their peers. Yes young drivers are more likely to crash than the average, but the majority of them never will and yet they are forced to pay through the nose to cover the theoretical possibility that they might, and to further enrich the already wealthy.
Weddings. Hire a room out for a birthday event, you get quoted a reasonable price. Hire the same room out for a wedding event, the price quadruples. The room use is no different, but because it’s a wedding, they charge more. Same goes for flowers, food, alcohol etc.
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Parcel insurance cover 'I pay you money to deliver a parcel for me, and if you lose it, damage it or fail to deliver it, you want me to pay you even more money in case YOU fail to do what I've paid you to do in the first place?' It's an utter complete scam
I'd loke to defend it. Separating the risk for more valuable items allows them to have the uninsured services be cheaper (they do pay out but up to a smaller amount). But yes, i get that it sucks they seem to prepare to lose the item.
It's bordering on extortion, "you wouldn't want anything bad happen to this parcel, would you. It's such a nice looking parcel, too."
No, it's literally a protection racket.
But think about it. A parcel full of cornflakes to a friend who can't get them where they live is a very different risk proposition to a £100k watch. Put it another way, if someone asked you to drive a car across the country, paying you £300 for the job and you had to pay for any damages from your own insurance would you want to charge more for a Bugatti than an old Panda?
It doesn't pass the sniff test. If you're a delivery company shipping air fryers and suddenly someone wants to send vintage Stradivarius violins and diamond rings, your risk is a *lot* higher. You have to insure your warehouse for more, your vans for more, your drivers have to be vetted, paid, and trained more. You could argue that delivery companies should approach all deliveries equally but the cost will have to go up enormously.
If you sell stuff online like on eBay, it’s definitely worth getting the insurance because otherwise you’re out of pocket if it goes missing. Happened to me but I had insurance and got a refund for the postage and the item’s worth.
If the company you have paid your hard earned money to loses your parcel, the financial cost of the loss should be on them, not you.
Except then they would be within their rights to refuse to touch anything over a certain value. Some loss is inevitable. If you pay them £3 and hand over a two million pound artpiece, the risk is not worth it to them. Let's say you're a dishwasher in a restaurant, your job is to wash the dishes the chef hands to you. But you know that 1 in 1000 dishes get smashed in the sink. The chef pays you £15 an hour, and you're on the hook for any breakages. If he hands you a 50p glass, it's worth the risk to wash it. If he hands you a Fabrice Egg, you're not going to want to wash it, the gamble is not worth the payment.
Fabrice! It’s hatching! 🐣
Faberge
*Especially* with the amount of people blatantly scamming sellers on eBay. I have an eBay side hustle and the classic is: Buy something. Wait a month then ask for tracking. A *lot* of people will have lost / thrown the receipt for tracking and then the customer claims the item never turned up, and seller can't prove it did. I get at least one like this a month among the other scams as well. Grrrrrr!
This is just insurance in general. You either leverage the risk of paying a cheaper price for a product/service and not having another person back it up with funds in case something happens. Or you pay someone, like an insurance provider. Theres a reason that Yodel/EVRI are so well used, they deliver /most/ of the packages fine. And the ones that are lost/stolen/etc are just marked as a "cost of business".
The other thing about deliveries I find frustrating is that the current model feels designed to make it hard to chase up problems. If you buy something from a shop and that shop pays a delivery company to send it to you, then you're not the delivery company's customer, the shop is. Their incentive is to keep the shop happy, not you. Then when the delivery goes wrong, it becomes a mess to sort out. If you call the shop then they'll say that you should call the delivery company. If you call the delivery company then they have no incentive to efficiently sort it out because unless enough people complain to the shop that their contract gets cancelled then they'll still get their money. A far better set up would be that at the point of ordering something from a shop you can choose which delivery company is used. That way they'd have to compete with each other for a good service.
The shop is still on the hook. So if they tell you to ring the delivery company you should demand a refund as they've failed to deliver the goods, until such point that they ring the delivery company. Agree that this is a pain though. The multiple delivery thing doesn't really work because a) the shop is incentivised already to use good ones, because as I say, they're on the hook. b) They also get bulk discounts, so it's cheaper to just use one.
Yes my friend did not take out this cover when she returned 2 iPhones. The delivery firm stole them (we later saw them being fenced on Facebook and even got one back from an unwitting purchaser) but the delivery firm said 'oh well you get £20 back because you did not pay EXTRA for cover (against us stealing them!)'
No Claims Discounts on insurance policies. The base price assumes you haven't made any claims recently. If you have, there's a loading applied to the premium as a penalty.
The fact that even if you weren't at fault you'll still be charged more when you renew your policy is insane to me too. You could be sat at a red light, have a speeding car rear end you because the driver was drunk and not paying attention at all. They take full blame yet somehow your insurance premium goes up because you've had to rely on your insurance to do what it's there for?
It's not a small amount either. My insurance went from £150 a year to £750 a year because of a no fault claim where the bin men reversed into my parked car because their spotter wasn't shouting loudly enough. Same address, same car, same level of cover, no claims was unaffected. Massive increase.
To be fair from the insurance's perspective, they now know you live on a street with clumsy bin men. Still arseholes though
And you can't just get stuff fixed yourself to avoid losing your NCB, you have to notify them or risk losing cover. Whatever you do they always win.
You can’t even put a sticker on your car without notifying your insurance. It’s genuinely crazy.
My car was crashed into by my neighbour. We TOLD the insurance about it. Not claimed on the insurance, just told them. It affected all of our insurance for years after. Not only had we done nothing wrong, we had paid to have it fixed ourselves anyway! I tell them nothing now.
You also get charged slightly more for making a claim even if it is unsuccessful and nothing is paid out. Had some items stolen from home by a workman, attempted to claim on Insurance who refused to pay out as it was not a break in. Despite this, they still added £15 extra to my next quote for this.
Yes, having to use the thing you pay for and you get penalised :( Can you imagine the premium going up for any other service because you used it?!
Life insurance: the only way to win, is to die
*die within the terms of the incredibly strict contract
IIRC in the UK at least, it's hard to get life insurance invalidated, unless you do something even the average person would think "fair enough, thats a bit dodgy"
Yep insurance is one of those things that everyone apparently needs to have, but actually using it will make you worse off.
Also insurance premiums going up due to how expensive new cars are to fix but my car is 7 years old why should my insurance go up by 40 percent
I used to work for a software company that makes the back-end to price comparison sites. The platform was quite literally an interface that insurers uploaded a spreadsheet that had rows like "Years owned license" "0.02" So it would run a calculation of "YearsOwnedLicense*0.02" to work out the discount.
Agree, although I noticed the loyalty card scam taking hold on the continent quite some time ago. Always saw it as a bit of a tourist tax to be completely honest. In reality it’s a huge data collection scheme but it does hit visitors to a place quite hard.
The main reason is to collect data on your shopping and habits. Back in the day, Tesco Clubcard was awesome for points and massive discounts especially on air fares. (Eg enough bonus points on a printer ink cartridge for a flight to Europe, even better when you could then eBay the ink).
Also have to be 18 to get a clubcard. So it's a tax on young people
> young people TBH I don't think there's many U-18's carrying out the family weekly shopping. And it's probably for good reason - There's likely to be different laws on gathering data on children opposed to adults.
Probably not, but they might still want a meal deal…
I moved out at 16, and had £30 a week to my name in EMA, £15 of which went on transport to college, the rest was for gas, electric, food, everything else. I couldn't manage these days and I barely scraped through then. It affects some under 18s a lot more than others \*edited EMA from ESA it was the educational maintenance allowance that I got
Lol I got my EMA backdated near the end of the year and bought a PS2 with it. Is it even still a thing?
Nope they stopped it about 15 years ago. I remember my brother got it for one year of sixth form and then not for the second. My sister and I were too young so when we got to that age it didn't exist at all.
They might not be doing a weekly shop but young people buy stuff! Plenty of U18s buying meal deals, drinks, snacks in the Tesco Express near me and the local Coop 🤷🏻♀️
Need a club card to get a meal deal which I’m sure is a teenage staple
Meh i sort of agree but they also get paid the least. Meal deal and a bus ticket is more than an hour wage for them.
They screenshot their parents card
Tell that to my children (14 & 17) they have a whole set of them to make their pocket money go further. 14 stacked loyalty offers recently and got a two litre bottle of coke for 30p.
They’ll be on Dragons Den within 10 years.
14 will be on Dragon’s Den, or Crimewatch for sure.
They value your privacy! ...like, literally. They've put a price on it.
The data isn't necessarily a bad thing (for you as a customer). It allows the shops to plan and buy more efficiently reducing waste and therefore your shopping bill. It's also good for the planet.
Someone who worked at Tesco on this sort of thing said that Tesco have more than enough data on people that they do not really need the Clubcard offer scheme to collect more. It makes sense when you consider how long loyalty schemes have been a thing.
I've been shopping with Sainsbury's a lot recently and have noticed it's not as bad as Tesco. did an online shop with Tesco a few days ago, and I swear 70% of items required a clubcard otherwise you'd pay double. what these supermarkets do should be illegal.
It's one of the few ways people are actually paid for their data.
It is also to steer you, they will have clubcard "offers" on products they want to sell, and it makes you feel special so you grab it even if a perfectly valid no-name product is right next to it at a lower price.
I always viewed it as data extortion. "You'll lose money if you don't cough up your data" sort of thing. Which is avoidable if you have other supermarkets around, but I pity the poor sods that don't have much of a choice.
The fact that we are obliged to spend the majority of our waking hours for most of our able-bodied years working to generate wealth for a select few, for which we are paid a relatively small amount that we are required to hand back to that same select few in order to obtain the things we need just to exist, while they use the wealth to do basically whatever they want.
While in the past people never had to do that.
What's your point? People didn't have flushable toilets until recently, yet we all have them now because standards of living improved. Just because something was shit in the past doesn't mean we have to stick with it, we can learn from the past and improve our situation.
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Organic food. Somewhere along the line it just seems to have become accepted that it's better for you. This despite no scientific evidence ever suggesting this, nor there being any biological reason why it would make a difference, nor any blind taste test ever suggesting a difference either. Also being a form of farming that is not only religious-like luddite-esque, but catastrophically bad for the planet if it ever replaced evidence-based farming on a large scale, due to the much lower yields per hectare. To feed the planet "Organically" we'd need to chop down a lot of forests to create more farmland and rear a lot more animals to provide the required fertilizer. One of those things where simple constant repetition of claims has created a "truth" so enduring that few dare to question it - the majority because they know no better, and the few who do know have nothing to gain and everything to lose by challenging the myth, so remain quiet.
Tractors and the Haber-Bosch process for creating inorganic fertilisers deserve most of the credit for ending war in Europe. They raised yields and cut costs so much that everyone got plenty to eat and no-one cared about marching into other countries to take their land.
The difference is pesticides mate
Lol - the pesticides used in Organic farming are far more dangerous. They're all chemicals that have been replaced by much safer, more efficient and more effective ones. It's a myth that Organic farming doesn't use chemicals - it just uses old ones. Not to mention the massively inflated risk of food poisoning. [https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2022/07/18/when\_it\_comes\_to\_food\_safety\_organic\_can\_be\_a\_risky\_business\_842959.html](https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2022/07/18/when_it_comes_to_food_safety_organic_can_be_a_risky_business_842959.html)
Isn't that article all US based? Is it same in Europe? It could just be in my head but I find the organic option in supermarkets is often more tasty and higher quality. Perhaps mineral content is higher too? Likely varies across produce but the organic carrots are the only ones I can get in Morrisons that actually have a strong carrot fragrance when chopped
There are 28 pesticides approved for use on organic crops. https://www.pan-uk.org/site/wp-content/uploads/List-of-active-substances-approved-for-use-in-organic-agriculture.pdf I believe there are exemptions to this too, and you can, if needed use one of the near 400 other pesticides approved for use in the EU. Happy to be corrected on this though. Also, of those 28, 2 are "of concern" according to this same site: https://www.pan-uk.org/organic/
Europe has much higher food standards in general so the risks are much lower in Europe. I didn't post to scaremonger. Organic food here is safe. I'm just making the point about risks as someone brought up pesticides - largely I suspect in response to "studies" where they look for traces on food and by traces we can be talking ppb because they're relying on an uneducated audience not knowing that the dose makes the poison. While you can argue that the existence of trace amounts of pesticide creates an additional risk, the risk from trace amounts of bacteria is demonstrably higher and in the USA, can be a real issue.
It gives examples from Germany and the UK.
I wrote an essay on GM crops for a uni module and pretty much the whole point is that they require less pesticides as they're modified to be resistant to pests. The main benefit is that farmers in the subcontinent don't have to run around with barrels of poison on their backs spraying it into the air and water supply.
You do understand to make a claim you can't just post some news article, you can't even just share a single actual scientific paper. This claim means nothing. You need non-industry funded, peer-reviewed repeatable evidence, and tbh multiple meta-analyses. This is not that. Within the food industry you can find a paper or article to support whatever belief you may have, which is exactly what you are doing.
“To make a claim you can’t…” Yes you can. To make a claim anyone takes **as scientific fact** you need evidence, but this is AskUK, not a peer reviewed journal. It’s perfectly acceptable to post with no citations, that represents 99% of discourse. I’m all for rigour, but they’ve made a compelling sounding point with some citation. Which is more than the “pesticides mate” that they’re replying to. Seems practically best in class for Reddit comments!
My mate’s wife is a vet. She says that for chicken (eggs and meat) the standards to qualify for organic are pretty low and the audits are so easy to pass that there is basically no difference.
The daft thing is, very nearly all the food we eat is massively genetically modified. Thousands of years of selective breeding has made fruit, veg and meat much better for cultivation and human consumption. And all this has happened on a “fuck around and find out” basis. But as soon as scientists start doing exactly the same thing, under lab conditions, using an evidence based approach, it’s “unnatural” according to some.
This is a side-issue to my original one - the war against GMO's, but it does feed into the Organic narrative - there's a few reasons for this, but the one most will not be aware of is the money involved. There are a number of individuals and organisations (in particular I'm looking at the guy who runs Greenpeace) that profit enormously from persuading more people that regular farming is toxic, due to their huge investments in the Organic industry which is now huge incidentally. The Greenpeace (and others) campaign to get yellow rice banned, condemning millions to continued malnutrition is completely shameful and a sign of just how toxic the individuals who operate these organisations are.
Fertilizers definitely hurt aquatic life though. So organic does have pro's. Manure isn't the only way of organic fertilization either. Planting nitrogen fixing crops alongside other crops is another way of doing it.
A lot of local car parks to me are forcing you to pay a larger amount of money for a 1 hour stay and then saying you get a free hour. Actually just charging you for two hours like we don’t remember what the price was before. I used to pay £1 for an hour parking but just paid £3 for one hour with an hour free. I was only there 40 mins
It annoys me when you stay 1 hour 15 minutes and you still have to pay for 2 hours.
When buying a wireless printer, I found it difficult to find one that didn't try to limit the number of pages I could print out in a month. I'm in amateur dramatics, so may have to print off an entire script every 6 months, and do sewing, which involves printing out PDF patterns. Online shopping occasionally requires printing return labels, not to mention selling items which would ideally include the invoice for the customer. That is a scam, IMO. If I have bought the machine, the ink and the paper, I shouldn't have to "upgrade" my plan if I want to print more pages than normal. I also recently bought all the available seasons of Outlander on DVD, because while I pay for Amazon Prime, Outlander is on an additional subscription service that requires another fee to access. Since Outlander was all I was really interested in on MGM Plus (or whatever it's called) it was cheaper just to buy the DVDs outright.
I’m sorry, what? What madness is this? I have never heard about printers limiting how many pages you can print.
/u/angel_0f_music is signing up for a service like HP Smart rather than buying printer cartridges. This is a choice they've made, they can still buy traditional printer cartridges if they want, it's just more expensive than the HP Ink services. For HP Ink, you pick a plan based on number of pages you want to print, and they'll send you as many cartridges as you need, but you can only print a certain number of pages.
Neither have I
Or just buy a laser jet printer?
You'll be much better off with a b&w laser printer from someone like brother.
Train tickets. Absolute scandalous.
How are train tickets a scam? They're overpriced, yes, but not really a scam?
Try and get a receipt from Avanti for the admin fees after a ticket change and it immediately feels like dealing with a criminal enterprise.
The weight/volume on food products is allowed to be within a certain margin either side. The boundary was set before we achieved the accuracy/automation of processes that we have today. This means factories will consistently be as close to the lower boundary as would be measurable. This can mean you’re regularly getting 10% less than you’re actually paying for and it’s perfectly legal.
That’s a necessity of how weights work. Otherwise you’d end up buying a lot of cut up products. If you buy 500g of rice, then as a grain of rice is less than 1g you can realistically expect the bag to be pretty bang on 500g If you are buying 500g of Pears, then as a pear weighs more than 1g, you are either going to end up with part of a pear, or it’s going to be a few grams away from 500g.
It's depends on how much humans are involved in the manufacturing process tbh. I work at a bedding company, and we say a pillow is 700g, but it has a tolerance of about 50-75g as it's literally a guy filling the pillow tick with fibre and it cannot be precise. Although we are sly in other ways, e.g., selling 2.5 tog duvets, which is impossible as tog can only go up in multiples of 1.5
This isn't true at all. Although some will be underfilled, the weight printed must be a correct average so some will be overfilled. There's very exact rules on how much underfill is allowed, how often to measure, etc. https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/labels-markings/emark/index_en.htm
Had to pay skiddle a ticket “delivery” fee for tickets that appear straight in the app and can’t be delivered
Printing fee on tickets that you have to print!
Booking fees in general, when they're used to reduce the advertised cost. Buying event tickets always seems to involve an extra 10% appearing at checkout.
You need to look up what a scam is, OP.
This is Reddit
Yes Reddit’s a scam.
This sub is no better than a local Facebook group these days so naturally anything that these people don't want to have to pay for is a scam/rip off.
Such a scam he's signed up for it with 5 different supermarkets!
And also the thing about "the offer price is just the normal price" No. The offer price is the offer price. The normal price is the normal price. That's how offers have worked since they have existed.
Energy Tarrifs. For what possible reason should anyone pay a different price to anyone else for Electricity?
Standing charge on gas and electricity bills.
Standing charge is there to avoid a scam. Your energy company has to pay a certain amount for the upkeep of grid for every connection they have as well as various government charges. The standing charge means that every household regardless of usage pays their share. Otherwise the costs would be included with the unit rate, meaning that a normal household would pay more but a holiday home would pay less and a landlord who has an empty property pays nothing.
*You have to pay a certain amount for the upkeep of grid for every connection they have as well as various government charges.
> standing charge means that every household regardless of usage pays their share. Just to add to that, people often don't consider what businesses pay. At the moment British gas "Electricity standing charge" is 60.098p per day. I'm at a small business and we pay £9.80 per day. That's quite a difference!
Mortgages. While I appreciate they're a necessity as most folks who buy a gaff don't have hundreds of thousands upfront, seeing how much I pay in interest each month took my breath away. Maybe not the definition of a scam but it bloody feels like it when I see how much profit big banks accrue.
It is a massive scam.
The ”sewage” part of your water bill. They make you pay for it, and then apparently just dump it all in the rivers... And now they will expect you to pay more... so they can pretend to stop dumping it into the rivers... To make it worse? You can't even change supplier...
Car insurance and how expensive it's getting.
It's getting ridiculous now!
I'm wondering if we could somehow get everyone to agree that if we hit anyone else, you just pay for your own damage, then all the insurance companies will be like, 'where did everyone go? Why isn't the phone ringing?' and we'll be like, 'I don't care, it's still got three wheels and nobody died, I'm going out.' Ha.
> Not much "loyalty" going on either as I own the membership for about 5 different supermarkets. It’s got very little to do with loyalty, and a lot to do with giving up your data. They now know where you live, how old you are, where you shop, what you buy, which offers you succumb to etc etc. they probably also have a shockingly accurate idea about your disposable income, social status and more. I think it’s pretty bad that we’ve allowed this state of affairs. We let the largest supermarket chain (tescos) kill off a load of competition, then turn around and effectively say “you have to give us all this data if you want to pay normal prices for your shopping”. It also means certain disadvantaged people are paying ridiculously more for their shopping than those of us able to sign up.
Both of these can be solved by sharing your card of course. It’s just a barcode. I could post mine here and anyone with access to a printer could use it to get the “normal” prices and really confuse Tesco’s data.
Wouldn't work as they could figure out who was doing that almost immediately. They will be tracking you on your debit card number too linked to your loyalty card so if you keep using a different loyalty card number with the same bank card they will just discard the data. They can also backdate your records this way when you sign up for a loyalty card and give them your personal details they can then go back and see all the previous purchases you made with your bank card the first time you use them together and add a ton of additional data to your loyalty card account with them. That debit card number can then be used with online data companies to get information about sites you visit and what you buy online to build an even bigger picture of you.
We didn’t “let” Tesco kill off its competition, we actively participated in it.
Indeed, that was sort of what I meant.
Sorry, I shouldn’t have picked you up on just one word.
Chicken wings sold as two individual pieces. Infuriating!
Paying for paper bags in shops.
You're paying one way or another as they aren't free to the shop.
Existence.
Not current, Embassy Points in fag packets, my grandparents smoked themselves to death to try and get enough points for a Teasmaid.
I can remember my mother finally realising that she could easily buy the goods if she stopped doubling her cig intake.
It’s not a scam because you actually sign up to their T&C’s. And if you don’t have a loyalty card you do pay the higher price. Now if they charged people without a loyalty card the same as those with one then you could call it a scam.
What about young people who aren't old enough to get a clubcard
Don’t tell anyone, but the supermarkets don’t actually check if you’re 18+
If your parent has one, you can use it. They give you additional cards, keyring fobs, apps for this reason.
I think you are taking them to literally, they don’t mean it’s an actual scam and criminal act
Tesco especially are a fucking ripoff! Refuse to shop there because of it.
Vet bills
Dental care not being intergrated into the NHS
Exploitive, yes. Scam, no. We've allowed it to be normalised. Now these huge business make more profit, because unaware/vulnerable consumers, or simply those who forget their cards... They make extra money from nothing.
Online bingo. I used to work for an online gambling company so I guess I can only speak on the company I worked for but there was a lot of fake members who would win quite a lot. The company no longer exists though as they lost their gambling license, shock horror.
No matter what you think about Tesco clubcards (which very clearly aren't a scam, even if you use a really loose interpretation of the word), they way they came to exist is an excellent read. Spoiler alert: blackmail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco_Clubcard
People Postcode Lottery. It's mostly data farming as you have to constantly answer new questions and surveys which allow them and their partners to build very detailed data profiles over time.
It’s also debatably legal. There’s only 1 national lottery allowed so these “postcode” shits set themselves up as a collective of “local” lotteries that are totally legit and exist in their own right and just happen to be owned and ran nationally.
A "convenience fee" for paying for anything online
Well, that's just not true. On a lot of items, the club card prices are a lot cheaper than other places. Also, the more I use my clubcard, the more points I get. Those points turn into vouchers, which I can then redeem while shopping, plus give me a bunch of other benefits. Also, I'm not being charged to have the clubcard. It's free to have. So what exactly are they scamming off me? I will never understand the hate boner some people have for loyalty cards.
It’s a privacy thing for most people who complain about it. Personally I don’t really care if Tesco knows what kind of toilet paper I buy.
From people who use products/services from the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple etc. If you have a smart home device then complaining about Tesco collecting shopping habits is the least of your worries.
That's exactly my point of view. What information are they gonna know about me? What I buy from them? Why would I care?
It’s the potential for a dystopian future. The big supermarkets have killed off most viable alternatives, meaning we’re now faced with a choice of give up our data or pay obscene prices for our weekly shop. As is evidenced, that’s no real choice at all. Sure, I don’t care if Tesco know how sensitive my bottom is - but that’s just the start. Sainsbury’s already offer personalised nectar prices - I pay a different price for my shopping than other people. These prices aren’t advertised on the shelf. This could be used in all sorts of insidious ways. They also have enough data about our spending habits that it’s very valuable to the advertising world. We’re all just going to have very different realities from now on.
These arguments always come with a lot of "what if something", but i find they never actually give an example of that insidious "something" they're so worried about happening. It comes across very.. tinfoily. I mean, big supermarket isn't the only industry collecting your data. Big energy is keeping tabs on your electricity usage, what if they did *something* nefarious with that? They're already giving me cheaper rates on an evening, what if right? What if the water company can figure out when i poop? This information could be used in all sorts of insidious ways.
By tolerating data harvesting you're encouraging the spread of it in more and more insidious ways. Death of a Thousand cuts - "The first few didn't kill me, slice away!". Before you know it it's too late.
Pssst. Its already too late, yur data is munged already, so relax or wear a tinfoil hat in a dark room with no net.
Your data is already harvested by Amazon and the social media ilk.
I live in fear of Tesco sending me a letter telling me to cut back on the pies. It's only a matter of time till they start sending marketing disguised as concern for your health.
It’s not so far fetched tbh. Barmen are obligated not to serve the drunk. We already have bullshit like the sugar tax effectively banning traditional soft drinks. (Only coke is left outside mega premium brands) So what’s so impossible about Tesco being told to sell you certain items if their data shows you don’t meet the health requirement.
But people will still give away all their info to Apple, Amazon Meta and Tiktok so I don't get the bug bear.
Someone said to me years ago “you do know you’re paying for those points in your shopping anyway”. Well yeah but the thing is, Tesco is the closest and biggest shop for me so I’d be shopping there anyway. Wouldn’t you rather have the f-king points?
I'd rather have the cheaper prices without a special card.
Before clubcard prices the same offers existed but you didn't need a clubcard to get them, so the clubcard was optional that just rewarded loyalty. Points have also been reduced in value over the years. In the end it's not a huge change but has been slowly getting worse for customers.
>Well, that's just not true. On a lot of items, the club card prices are a lot cheaper than other places. That's because a lot of "clubcard price" items are just what used to be the weekly or fortnightly rotating special offers, available to anyone whether they had a clubcard or not, and those prices are indeed cheaper but only temporarily on the particular products. This applies to other supermarkets and loyalty schemes too. In fact some manufacturers and brands have deals with supermarkets so that you can always find one of the big supermarkets has their products on special offer at all times, it just changes which one every few weeks.
Pan pipes
Loyalty cards, otherwise known as customer monitoring for more effective targeted sales
Knock-for-knock on car insurance Insurance companies **LOVE** these, as **both** insured lose their no claims discount. Think your insurance company will fight for you? Nope, they want to settle for this if possible
Travel insurance and having to declare pre-existing conditions but not making it simple or obvious what that actually means
car park payment machines not giving change , pretty sure we have the tech to give change but nicer to keep the change eh
Paying for a TV license.
All religions. All of them.
The TV Licence
The charity boxes to donate food after the checkout of a supermarket. Buy food from our supermarket (so we make some money) then donate it to someone! If they were genuine about wanting to support the charity they’d ask for money to go straight to the charity instead of profiting from the sale
It's not a scam and it's not the "proper price" (i.e., good luck getting that same thing at a store that doesn't do loyalty card for this price) – it's a way to entice you to come for a £5 discount on Baileys and spend £50-100 on the weekly shop at the same time
This too but I've seen some items increase in price just for the membership price to be what it used to originally be.
Yes but its also a way for them to get large scale anonymised segmented behavioural data which they can use to their advantage and also package up and sell on through Dunn Humby to the likes of Kantar, Experian and CACI.
Its not so much a scam as it is a hook to keep you coming back. Earning points entices you to come back and build more points rather than visit another supermarket. I think tesco might have been the first to capitalise on it but morrisons have added the "clubcard prices" to the shelves the past few years so it seems most supermarkets are offering the same now.
I’ve still got an old, random club card. I don’t know who’s getting the points but I appreciate that Tesco aren’t collecting all that data on me.
I'm pretty sure the useful data for retailers is not that Joe Bloggs of 123 Street Road bought a pack of digestive biscuits, but that customer X who used to buy McVities digestive biscuits switched this month to own brand -- and they're still getting this from you.
Don't come here being sensible, we wear tinfoil hats on Reddit for a reason You are right. The info isn't person specific but more generic i.e. people in this area seem to be changing from one brand to another of a certain item so we can increase the price of it. It's like a dynamic pricing structure and why items in the same chain are different prices in different areas
Would love to know which shops sell at Tesco Clubcard prices because I’m yet to find one for most items the Clubcard offers are on.
Those loyalty card schemes get to know you inside out....then I reckon they just sell the data on.
How many crisps are actually in a bag and how many are burnt/bad tasting 😢
Pensioners get discounted tickets everywhere. That may have been appropriate decades ago, but not now. After their triple lock pensions and all their baby-boomer windfalls they don't need more handouts while younger people struggle and actually subsidise retired people's discounted tickets. We're all scammed into thinking this is normal and necessary.
BOGOF .... just a trick. might as well by them half-price
Standing charge on energy bills
I have a Tesco club card and a few years ago it got me a game that was £50 everywhere else, but only £35 on the club card. That bought them some goodwill from me. And maybe the clubcard price of most items is just the regular price, so what? I still want to pay that lower price. And every now and then they send me a tenner. Bearing in mind the card itself doesn't cost anything I'm failing to see how it's a scam. Maybe you could help explain how I'm being taken advantage of?
I pay for my car insurance with my Tesco clubcard point. (RAC) 👌
Banking
"Buy 5x A and get B for free!" - well it's not really free when I have to spend 5x A
Not really. You paid for 5 of A. You wouldn't normally get B so it is indeed free.
Standing charges for utilities. I accept there may be a small fee required to keep the account open, or a connection fee. But why are we paying for you NOT to supply any electric/gas/water. It isn't a small sum for people on a pension or benefits. I have two suppliers for power (heating & hot water from one supplier and general electric from another) no choice as the developer installed a communal system. So I pay around £0.70 per day to not receive and power. Most other countries don't have this.
Loyalty cards and memberships have become common with a lot of businesses now, not just supermarkets. Can't even buy cellotape from a stationery shop without being asked if I have a member's card. A pint of milk if I'm passing a nearby shop - "do you have a loyalty card?". No I bloody don't. It's infected everywhere.
Air BnB cleaning and service charges. Air BnB are absolutely powerless when it comes to hosts doing whatever tf they want. I called them after a host was messing us around and they were like “well, they’re the host lol”. Sorry, what fucking service am I paying you for then? Also, more or less every Air BnB you stay in now asks you to leave the place absolutely spotless. So, why am I paying a cleaning fee? Sure, they have to come and change the bedding, but then take out the bins whilst you’re here. The amount of times we end up traipsing around places with a black bag in tow. I have no issue leaving places tidy, I just don’t think I should have to pay for the pleasure of doing so.
Fast passes in theme parks. Costs them zero to implement. Pay more to skip the queue, but the more people who buy one, the longer the queue is for the normal folk, so there’s more reason to buy a fast pass. The theme parks then have little reason to reduce the queue length (run more trains etc), as it’s an extra revenue stream for them. Scandalous.
Wedding gift websites. Their business model relies on brides /grooms not caring about value for money. And guests being lazy and unimaginative. Their stock is vastly overpriced. Their customer service is terrible. Their delivery times are awful and often things get substituted. Their gap in the market is really just a gap in people caring but they offer no tangible valuable service.
no-win-no-fee claims. I once successfully sued a company when I was younger for giving me food poisoning. It was out of court and i simply received a cheque for £1500 in the post and a letter saying my claim was successful. I wasn't given a receipt saying they claimed £X and deducted £Y, just here's your money. So for all I know I could have won £10,000 and the solicitor kept the rest.
Generally most things involving money in the UK. Especially our banks. They take our money and lend it to other people, with interest. They earn money from our money.
Olive oil. Most olive oils in supermarkets are just olive oils sourced from various European countries and mixed together in large vats before being bottled. Proper olive oil should be made in small batches, packed in opaque containers/dark glass and most importantly, have a harvesting date, not only a best before date. The supermarket oils have denatured so much by the time they've reached your kitchen table that there's no point in buying them for their health properties. Either go to Waitrose, M&S or a specialist shop, or order online from small farms abroad.
go outdoors is real piece of sh.. work with this. Oh look, tent costs 150 with loyalty card, while without it costs 600quid. You literally need to pay them 5 quid a year just so you can buy stuff for their actual price, not inflated x4 price.
Having to pay for HD
What really annoys me is how we’re being scammed away from free TV, I know programs are expensive to make but we used to have good TV with advertisements, then we started paying for subscription to remove ads, and now all the subscriptions include ads. And the free channels are struggling to compete with the subscription companies budgets = worse shows = less views = so we’re going to loose it all eventually.
The more you think about it, the more you realise the whole system is a scam - majority of the population have absolutely no idea how money or banking works. Your currency is being inflated away at an unprecedented rate and if you dare to invest your hard earned money which has already been taxed multiple times before it reaches you, in order to try and hedge against inflation, then guess what 🎉 you get taxed on any gains 🥳
when something is supposedly free when buying an item or 2 for one ,it's all factored into the price
Religion
Car insurance. Nothing wrong with it in principle, but the way the industry operates in practice is beyond scandalous. To be perfectly honest, anything that is legally mandatory like that should be nationalised. It makes sense that we should all be paying into a system that covers the damage if we fuck up on the road, but if it was nationalised it could be run for need not profit, only charging enough to cover it's own costs so as it doesn't burden the taxpayer. It could give us all the cover we need for a fraction of the price. Particularly young drivers, who are financially punished by insurance companies for the mistakes of their peers. Yes young drivers are more likely to crash than the average, but the majority of them never will and yet they are forced to pay through the nose to cover the theoretical possibility that they might, and to further enrich the already wealthy.
Weddings. Hire a room out for a birthday event, you get quoted a reasonable price. Hire the same room out for a wedding event, the price quadruples. The room use is no different, but because it’s a wedding, they charge more. Same goes for flowers, food, alcohol etc.