Consumers need to get better at understanding TCO when buying things. Or maybe the government should be slapping those “annual cost” stickers like they do on washing machines to understand how much electricity they use.
Is it time to post the philip k dick Ubik quote again?!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I remember starting this book back in college and rolling my eyes at this scene for being so campy and tacky that I just dropped the book.
I came back to it just a few weeks ago out of disbelief that that is where we've arrived today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocker-up [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35840393
RingConn was cheaper, the build quality seems great, and there's no subscription fee. That made the decision a no-brainer.
Even if they "knew" they may well have not been accounting for it properly. I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach. Subscription fees are bleeding more people than ever dry.
This is my trick. I simply take the monthly price and multiply am by ten to quickly get a crude imperfect annual cost (adding two more months if I wanted to be exact)
Then I’ll look and go gee is this thing actually worth $150 or whatever the value is and ask “or more” assuming I wouldn’t cancel?
The answer is usually no. I’m slowly teaching this trick to my elementary school daughter.
Should we start a "subscription review day": make a list of all your subscriptions, change them to yearly amounts and ask yourselves "am I getting that much value out of it"?