Four goods and services I can’t understand from a buying standpoint.
Movie Theater Food
Everyone already knows this is gouging of the highest caliber. The food is the primary income for theaters but I still don’t care. The food is, wholesale, the cheapest shit you can get: cups full of watered-down sugar water, bags full of depression era cuisine, and giant boxes of stale candy that have more box than candy. Yet you pay premium prices for them. The most annoying thing is that whatever size item you order, (assuming it’s not the largest), you will be immediately solicited to increase it’s size by one “for only 25 cents.” No! I don’t want any more than that! Just give me what I ordered! What a joke. All of the sizes are 25 cents apart. It’s like the prices are so incredibly inflated already It doesn’t even matter that the amount of popcorn you get corresponds to a relevant monetary value. They might as well have one price for all the sizes. Then they wouldn’t have to be constantly bothering us with this stupid 25 cents crap.
Gaming Memory Cards
Essentially, a gaming memory card is a flash drive that only stores game save data. I’ve never really liked them. It actually makes me miss old cartridge games. With those, you didn’t have to wait three minutes to play a game and you saved your game with the game instead of consolidating everything on a tiny expensive card that can easily get lost. Anyway, about the cards, they only hold a little bit of memory. (Lets just use the Playstation 2 card for example.) The PS2 cards hold eight megabytes and cost 25 dollars. That’s as expensive as a game. But guess what, that’s also as expensive as a one gigabyte flash drive. That’s 125 times the memory of the memory card. Sony can’t tell me after that, that the price is justified because it interfaces with it’s gaming platform. They could however tell me that they are a giant asshole. In my opinion, memory cards should never have existed in the first place, at least not as a primary storage device. You need them but they aren’t even included with the game platform. They’re labeled as an “accessory.” Yeah they’re optional because most people like just playing the first part of a game over and over without ever beating it or leaving their consol running for weeks on end as they progress. It’s like they ripped out a part of the consol itself and sold it separately as a cheap attempt to get more money. Hey here’s a good idea, take the consol’s power cord, chop it up into little one-inch-long pieces that connect together and sell them separately for $5 each. Consumers will have to keep buying cord pieces until they can build one long enough to reach a power outlet. It’s Brilliant!
Ringtones
Ringtones are a pointless vanity so of course you’re going to be ripped off by them. Most ringtones that don’t sound like shit cost $2-$3 each. A ringtone is about 10-15 seconds long. If you think that’s outrageous consider this: an entire song on any given online music store costs 99 cents. How fucking stupid! Why does it cost three times more to get 20 times less? If this made any sense at all it would be five cents a ringtone.
Subscription Gaming
I might just be extremely cynical, (because I know I’m the only one that feels this way), but I just think it’s retarded to buy a game that I have to continually buy to play. I’d rather just use that money to buy more games. And I don’t want to be married to the game either. I don’t want it to feel like I’m wasting the money I put into the subscription If I play some other game on the side. And I don’t like the idea of spending indefinite amounts of money on something that’s not permanent. The bottom line is your game/character is gone unless you pay for the rest of your life. If they’re not going to have free gameplay they should at least make the game installation discs free. I’ve got games that I can play whenever I want for free and the game data isn’t going to just disappear if I don’t play it for a while. What’s wrong with that? Why be such a bitch about it?
