Why does everything feel like a scam?
I am sick and tired of every single thing on earth needing a subscription.
The other day I needed to print something, I had given into the HP subscription gimmick months before and had received my ink in the mail, I had been paying for it already for a few months, but after a while of not using the ink I just cancelled subscription and figured I would finish off the ink I had left and start it back up once I had emptied out the cartridge. Fast forward to this one fateful day where I needed something printed out ASAP of course as one normally does with these things, I go and turn it on. I click print, but it would not print. Why? Because my subscription was not active. Despite having paid for the ink for months without needing a new one sent to me, I still could not use my printer that I had bought and paid for, and the ink I had been paying for, because I was currently not actively paying for a subscription.
If you are thinking I went ahead and paid for the subscription, then you would be wrong. Instead I threw that printer into the back of my closet and that is where it has lived for the last year and a half.
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Just retelling all of this makes my blood boil. I am not one to have an issue with subscriptions, or at least I did not before, but now I am honestly just sick and tired of it. The fruits of this first started when I paid something like four hundred dollars for my Oura ring just to now pay over five bucks a month for the rest of eternity just to use the very thing I had already bought. I am just so tired of companies doing the most to get every single last penny they can out of us. Everyone has turn into a used car sales guy and I hate it here.
The printer was just the last straw for me. But the subscription model has become utterly ridiculous, at one point BMW wanted to make you pay for a subscription to access the ability to have heated seats1. The hardware was literally installed already but they had to make you pay for it. What in the world is even going on?
We don’t own anything anymore, we don’t own the movies we buy, we subscribe to be able to watch them and hope the streaming service we bought it from somehow does not lose the rights to sell it, we do not own our music, we stream it, the second you do not pay all the playlists are gone or filled with ads you can’t even workout without a major vibe killer, we don’t even own the books we read anymore, we pay to be able to read it for now.
And mind you my gripe is not even over how much some of these things cost, my problem is the way this all has me feeling, and I doubt I am the only one, every single transaction, every app we instal or thing we buy now comes with an added cost, and an added concern of “what is the catch here?”. Call me a boomer, an old man screaming at the children to get off my lawn but by golly I just want to buy a printer that will just print, I want to buy a ring that will just do what it promised, a coffee maker to make coffee, a thing to do what the thing was made to do, not a thing with a huge asterisk that will forever cost me something to use.
It honestly feels like the focus is not on creating good products but instead on trying to capitalize and gain the most amount of money from consumers. We have gone from a high trust society that knew great household brands that were good, that cared about us, that cared about craftsmanship and the art of creating good and beautiful things. There is no longer money to be made in being trustworthy, now the money is made in how close you can get to scamming without ever actually scamming anyone.
But this is what we have created, we no longer live in a high trust society, at least not one like we used to have. Now to buy anything you cannot just trust the place you are buying from, or the salesperson, or the brand name you used to know and love, no, now you have to spend an eternity doing research, trying to find honest people like you who have tried the product and who are willing to tell you the truth about it. I mean when was the last time you went to a mechanic not scared to death they would scam you out of a bunch of money for made up stuff that isn’t even wrong with your car? The same with your dentist who somehow will tell you, you have 10 cavities and a bunch of teeth needing pulled when the guy next door to him tells you you’re actually fine. Who is telling the truth? Who is honest? who is not trying to scam us? Who in the world can we trust? Not the experts apparently, not anymore. Now we must become the experts at everything.
This is what bothers me in all of this discourse, it is not just about the printer, or the stupid ink, or even the money, it is actually about how companies now have decided the best way to make a living is not to make good products that I want to buy again, but instead it is to engineer one more clever way to keep its hands in my pockets.
I am tired of being sold another thing. Stop trying to take my money, I do not want to feel this way anymore, I want to feel proud, feel good about where I spend my money, I want to invest in companies, in people who are good, who care, who tell the truth, who do not see me just as another dollar bill ripe for the taking2. This is why companies have gone the route of the influencer because they know that the consumer craves a personal face, a personal relationship with the things they buy and invest in, problem is, much like brands and companies, the influencer has also become a problem, an expert we cannot trust, when every beauty influencer thinks every single mascara is life changing who in heck do you actually listen to? I don’t need a mascara that will lift my eyelashes to the moon, solve world hunger and make my husband love me even more, I just want a dang mascara that will do the job and not make my eyes red. As you can imagine the age of A.I has just made this all even worse, now you don’t even need to pay an actual person to sell you on a product you can just invent one. A mom for the mothers, a dad for the fathers, a golfer for the golfers, a nurse for the nurses, any and everything into our wild imaginations can be done quickly with just a click of a button. Everyone is sick of being sold to, more courses, more guides, more get rich, more solve your problems instantly, a non ending sea of sameness. We the people want realness, we want people who are people, we want to invest and spend our money on real things with real causes, not pay another stupid subscription just to print the return label for the stupid thing we were conned into buying in the first place.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-responds-to-fury-over-heated-seats-subscription-fee
And mind you I am not opposed to subscriptions that pay for an actual continuing service. I publish a paid newsletter, after all for heavens sake. What I despise is the transformation of ordinary ownership into this state of permanent dependence, this new idea that I can buy the thing, hold it in my hands, keep it inside my own home, and still somehow need a corporation’s monthly permission to use it.
This is absolutely spot on. You've articulated with great clarity what was, for me, a sense of muddled frustration. I've virtually stopped buying things these days, it just makes life much simpler.
I feel this in my bones. That’s why my husband and I are huge of physical media and this idea of analog is coming back. We are tired of not owning anything anymore while the rest of society tells us to just get with the program and move on! No use in fighting it!