If you are any age at all, then you have probably complained that things are ‘more expensive these days’! Well, the truth is – they are not!
Take, for example, the cost of an air-fare from London to San Francisco. I flew to California, for the first time, in 1987. The fare cost approximately £300 per person. This was pre-internet, and I spent nearly a month making phone calls, checking prices, till I beat the fare down to that amount. Even travel agents could not match that price.
I flew from London to San Francisco last year. Just before Christmas. The fare was, believe it or not, almost exactly the same. Approximately £300 per person. The odd thing was, for only 2 people, it cost me over £1200.
Let me explain why.
25 years ago, if you bought something, you paid the quoted price – and that was that.
Nowadays, you pay the quoted price PLUS fuel surcharge, security surcharge, Airport tax, administration charge, I-can’t-think-of-a-good-reason-but-hell-why-not charge, this tax, that tax and the next tax. All of which add up to more than the cost of the fare!
It’s the same nonsense everywhere else. Buy insurance – and pay insurance tax PLUS administration charge, easy payment surcharge and interest PLUS breakdown cover that you don’t need. They even charge you if you want an insurance certificate (an absolute essential if you insure a car)!
Buy a theatre ticket and you pay a booking charge. Make one booking for 4 people and they charge you for 4 booking charges. PLUS an administration charge!
Put your money in a bank – in effect, give them an interest free loan – and they hit you for all sorts of charges, including the inevitable administration charge, and the breakdown cover charge that you already do NOT need from your car insurance. As for the concierge service charge – well, I’m still waiting for my concierge to turn up.
Do we really need all these extra charges? NO! Just quote me a price and I’ll say YES or NO. Add it all up (if they can use a calculator) and tell me what it costs. Then prices on those Price-Comparison sites might actually mean something.
And stop trying to get me to ‘upgrade’ to the Gold, Platinum, Titanium or Totaloblivium services that either give me, as an ‘extra’, what I used to get as standard, or offer me (at extra cost) services that I neither want nor need! How many concierges or breakdown covers can I possibly need?
Perhaps, I should start charging an administration fee for filling in those 35 page forms that government departments hand out. Or charging a concierge fee for handling those unwanted phone calls trying to sell me no win – no fee claim referrals.
Or, and I really fancy this one, can I charge a fixed-penalty notice when stopped by a uniformed official for no good reason (boredom is NOT a good reason!)
One more thing …
Why do payday loans companies borrow money from banks at a miserable few percent, but charge interest equivalent to 4,000 percent?
They don’t even offer a concierge service, or breakdown cover.
Now that is a bit mean, don’t you think?