Fleecing People With Vanity

Is it strange to many people that they find ingenious new ways to fleece people without them realising they are being fleeced solely for money?

They have a new weapon in this armoury and people fall for it, it is no suprise to many of us that old ideas are regurgiatated and morphed into new ideas and the latest version of this is the "BLING" element of our lives into which the younger generation is constantly being indoctrinated, but why?

In decades past we had the wholesale promotion of womens rights, the right to go to work and not stay at home and look after the children, clean and tide the home, go on the bus and do the shopping, and cook the husbands dinner so it was on the table when he came from work, and this morphed into the wholesale selling of time saving devices such as electric washing machines, electric irons, efficient and cheap electric cookers with timers so they would switch on at a pre set time and cook the dinner, and these labour saving devices were aimed at women. To buy them you needed to either see the tally man who would lend you the money with extremely inflated interest rates but could pay back weekly, and then you got the companies manufacturing these devices and offering you direct sales "on the knock" where you paid for them weekly, but at much lower rates than the tally man could offer and basically they cut out the middle man and his profits.

Manufacturers also realised that instead of building very well made devices which would last for 20 years they could build and sell them cheaper if they were only designed to last for 10 years, they could make more profit on each sale and they could make two sales in the same 20 year period, and this set the trend for spiralling prices on consumer goods.

Many items could be leased and the favourite item was the television, pay per view is nothing new as these had a coin box on the back which you fed with coins so you could watch television, albeit it black and white.

Now we have the modern or latest variant of this system with consumer goods and the list is growing, and this modern variant is leasing or renting many things instead of buying them. Of all the consumer goods, the mobile phone was the most rented item of the 21st century and this idea was lifted straight from the manual of business, let me explain. Business offsets the costs of their business against tax so whatever they spend is accounted for and deducted from their profits; if they lease an office or factory the cost of this is added to their running costs, if they pay staff this is deducted along with any expense they incur, although this is simplistic it explain what happens.

If a business makes a profit of £100,000 and it has expenses of £50,000 you deduct the £50,000 from the £100,000 and you are left with £50,000 and you are only taxed on that £50,000 and this business principle is being applied to people, but why? people cannot deduct any expenses so any profit is fully taxed and the Government and corporations cut out the middle man and make more profits for themselves, so we can look at a few examples of this.

Mobile phones are sold in several ways and as most are "on contract" which means you pay a fixed monthly amount directly to your phone provider which means thay have a guaranteed income for the duration of the contract which can be 1 year, 18 months, or even two years, but they give you a free handset of the latest design. Lets work out some figures, the average monthly contract price for a domestic consumer on contract is around £35 per month, if we multiply this by 12 months we are paying £420 per yesr for a fixed price contract, but they give you the handset don't they? read the contract and you will find thet they give you the "use" of a mobile phone and that the handset actually remains the property of the company with which you have the contract, now the bling element.
You get a new phone every year, actually you dont as all you get is a new replacement handset each year which is still owned by your provider, but its a £500 phone, actually it isn't as the company buys so many of them that they will pay less than 10% of what they claim it is worth which means they pay less than £50 per handset, and when your contract finishes they want their handset (property) back. Now comes the ral scam, they supply these returned handsets to a refurbishment company for £75 so they are already making a profit on them, these are then shipped in bulk to other (usually third world) countries where they are sold for £150 each.
DO YOU OWN YOUR PHONE? NO.

Cars are now being leased and the Motability charity have done this for years, a disabled person gets their disability benefit paid directly to Motability and they get a car for 3 years which includes all servicing and running costs, you get a designated number of sets of tyres and all servicing included along with breakdown cover, but this is only ever a lease car which a disabled persons disability money pays for.
This has morphed into the bling element by companies offering you various packages to buy a new car, you can get a fixed term rental for a fixed period of 1 - 3 years and at the end of the rental term you can negotiate a new package for a new car, or you can buy the vehicle you already have for an over inflated price, you get the benefit of a new car and registration plate every 1 - 3 years and the bling element has really come into play here. You can change from manufacturer to manufacturer and have the latest "in vogue" vehicle sat on your driveway.
DO YOU OWN YOUR CAR? NO.

Houses are really in the news as so many youngsters cannot afford them as they are priced out of the market so they have to rent if they want to live on their own and this is now big news.
DO YOU OWN YOUR OWN HOME? NO.

We can clearly see that vanity is forcing people to rent instead of own, with more and more people renting homes and cars instead of buying them outright it means they are cornering the traditional two largest purchases people traditionally buy and own, and with mobile phones and other devices they are taking ownership of assets away from the public at large and using the vanity element to do so.

To put this into perspective and using myself as an example:

I bought my £500 mobile phone on offer for £80 and it is two years old, in those two years I found the best pay as you go deal for me and I have spent less than £30 per year on calls, so in two years it has cost me less than £140 and I own the phone, I recently looked up what I could sell it for and was offered £105 for it from one of these companies buying up mobile phones, so an instant profit.
I OWN THE PHONE.

My oldest 4X4 has been in my (well, trusts) ownership for 9 years, I bought it cheaply as it had a braking fault which meant the dealer couldn't bleed the rear brakes but they require a different technique which I know how to do, even after 1 litre of brake fluid and 10 minutes of my time it didn't cost a lot to correct.
I can get £1500 less than what I paid for the vehiclewhich means I have lost £166.66 per year and in that time it has cost me nothing more than routine servicing, an exhaust section, a battery, and a vehicle battery for the key fob and 2 minutes to reprograme it back to the alarm system.
I OWN THE VEHICLE.