Herein this article we discover useless “services” designed to separate stupid people from money. By moving this scam onto smart phones, it gives “ordinary” people a way to look like they’re part of some higher class (technology, wealth, etc.).
My brother’s wife is a superb example. While running between tennis classes for herself and various extra-curricular activities for her kids, she uses several such services. The ones accessed via apps on her smartphone allow her to look like a tech elite amongst the other soccer moms. Busy busy important important person making black magic on her $150/month “phone.” She can use the word “app” without comprehending what it means.
Which is kind of at the root of this and the article misses it entirely. The people suffering from excessive affluenza that are the target are exactly the ones spending $150/month so they can play Angry Birds while “watching” their kid at baseball or ballet. Since they are “attending” the event or lesson, it somehow connotes they are “participating,” even when they are in an oblivious little fog as to what is going on around them.
“Yeah, yeah baby. I tots saw you get that base run. You are my little hero!”
So she hires various services. The maid that comes twice a week ($100/week) to rearrange the dust a bit (sorry, no dishes, no windows, no laundry). Someone to walk the dog in the middle of the afternoon ($20 per day, every weekday) while the kids are in school and shes playing tennis. Or somewhere.
My personal favorite: someone else does her shopping while she is “Doing Something Important.” For only a $25 service fee, someone buys whatever she puts on the shopping list … but every single item bought is full price and more. Never any discounts, never any sale prices, never buys something on special that is a good target of opportunity this week for next week when you know you’ll need it.
So, that little shopping trip that you or I might make and spend $50 or $75 on groceries is now $120 or $200 worth of groceries. Because, for only $25, someone else “did all the work” and walked through the store throwing random shit into the basket that met the shopping list, but with no attention paid at all to the difference between chicken at $1.99 a pound or $7.99 a pound. You know, $5 or $25, it doesn’t matter. It’s “a package of chicken” and the idiotic waste of money is “someone else’s money.”
So, by the time all these services add up, it’s “only” $1000 a month, or $1300, depending on the month, of after-tax income. Plus $150 for platinum-plated smart-phone connectivity. Plus spending double or more on groceries.
Have we even touched on impulse buying on the internet? That extra $200 a week on cute T-shirts, a baseball cap (for only $30 delivered!), the latest ebook copy of 50 Shades of Gray, just another $5 to add to a kindle library that isn’t even 20% read (just no time for reading).
But … all that personal time that she has freed up. To, y’know, Do Things. Important Things. that involve driving around the city all day using only 10 or 15 gallons of gas every day or two. While my brother works 10 hour days, with his company calling him at night and on the weekends with work-related problems to trouble-shoot by tomorrow morning before he gets back to work.
And at the end of the month there is very little, sometime no, money to dump into a college fund for the kids.
Last Christmas I had to listen to the complaints about how hard it is to make ends meet, how my brother is trying to find a better-paying job (he makes six digits), how the kids are suffering because they can’t afford the latest designer volleyball tote bag with matching water bottle and sweat band to match what all the other kids are using.
It’s the same consumer-driven shit that’s been going on since the 1950s. Convince idiots that they cannot live without something and grift off as much cash as that cow can be milked for.
Turns out, there’s an app for that.
