Things That Suck
The restocking fee is not a fee for restocking
It is charged as a percentage of the price rather than the cost of handling, which tells you what it is actually for.
Sujit Behera
Money writer, SuckButt
Sujit writes about fees and subscriptions, and audits his own bank statement monthly out of paranoia.
Contact Sujit through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
14 articles
Things That Suck
Unlimited has a footnote, and the footnote is the actual product
Nothing sold as unlimited is unlimited. The interesting question is where the real ceiling sits and why it is never printed next to…
Money Suckers
Drip pricing: quoting a number nobody will ever actually pay
The headline price is engineered to win a comparison, not to be paid. Everything else arrives once you are already three screens in.
Money Suckers
The cancel button is three menus deep, and that is a design decision
Nobody accidentally builds a cancellation flow that takes nine clicks and a phone call. Every step in it was measured.
Money Suckers
The card machine asks whether you want to be charged in your own currency
Saying yes hands the exchange rate to whoever owns the terminal. The helpful-sounding question is the entire product.
Money Suckers
Loyalty is priced as a penalty, and the new customer gets the discount
Staying put on the same contract is a decision to accept the highest price the seller believes you will tolerate.
Money Suckers
The tip screen has rotated toward you and it is suggesting twenty-five per cent
Payment terminals turned tipping into a public interaction with defaults, and the defaults have quietly climbed.
Things That Suck
Some assembly required, and one bag of screws is the wrong bag
Flat-pack furniture is a triumph of logistics that ends with a person on a bedroom floor holding a diagram with no words in it.
Money Suckers
Nought per cent finance, paid for by everybody who misses a payment
Interest-free instalments are not free to provide. Someone is paying, and the structure tells you fairly precisely who.
Things That Suck
Your seat, your bag and your boarding pass now cost extra each
Unbundling turned one price into eight, and the headline fare is the only one anybody compares.
Money Suckers
The bundle contains four things you use and eleven you have never opened
Bundling raises the average price paid by making the individual prices unknowable. That is the feature, not a side effect.
Money Suckers
A fee for a paper bill, and a fee for not paying the way they prefer
Charging for the ordinary way of doing something is a discount on the preferred way, described in reverse.
Things That Suck
I understand you are frustrated, says the thing that caused it
Support chatbots are deployed to deflect contacts, which is a measurable goal, and resolution is a much harder one to measure.
Money Suckers
Your points were worth something until the day they were not
A loyalty currency is issued by the company that decides what it buys, and there is no rate anybody has to defend.