East rip-offs to avoid

I've always considered it this column's mission to help my readers put up walls between themselves and everyone close to them. Which is why today I'd like to turn everyone's attention to the long grass of consumer purchases, and the jackals that lie in wait for you there. With the tips presented here, you'll soon find yourself saving five, even six dollars a week, which, over the course of 10 years, will add up to two or three grand. Which ... is actually a lot less impressive than it sounds. Huh. OK, I'll also put in some advanced tips, ways to avoid being ripped off so hard that you may actually rip something else entirely. So, as with most of the advice I give, please, please, remember to stretch first.

#5. Razor Blades
Disposable razor blade cartridges can cost more than $4 per cartridge, which, when replaced once per week, turns shaving into one of the most expensive face-related expenses we ever have to face. And yet, thanks to society, shaving is something that can't be ignored, unless we live in the hills, or Portland.

How to Avoid Being Ripped Off:
Replace the blades less often. First, those guidelines that say we should replace our blades three or four times a month come from the companies that are selling the blades. Now, these guys do know razors, but because they also know "taking your money," they might not be the most trustworthy source of advice. Instead, try replacing your blades when they stop working. And you can keep your blades working a lot longer with a few easy tips, also conspicuously absent from the razor blade cartel's promotional reading.
Razor blades don't dull from cutting your soft doughy face, nor even your food-encrusted whiskers -- the dulling effect actually comes from water and air corroding the metal. You can greatly limit that corrosion by simply drying the blades after each use -- blotting them on a towel is the easiest technique, but other people have had success with dipping them in alcohol, blowing on them really hard or throwing them in the direction of the sun.

#4. Gas
Gasoline makes our cars run and our Molotov cocktails burn. And depending on how much you drive, or how much you fight The Man each week, gasoline may very well be one of the biggest expenses you have. Although the rising price of oil is the primary cause of the rising price of gas, the fact that every oil company is currently making record profits is justification enough for your rage, and offers a hint of who to offer your next batch of justice cocktails to.

How to Avoid Being Ripped Off:
There are a lot of tricks on how to save money when shopping for gas floating around out there. Gas-saving websites let you track local gas price fluctuations. Also, try timing your purchases to buy gas at the cheapest times (mornings, the 1980s). And if you can avoid driving all summer, you should definitely do that.

#3. Extended Warranties
Extended warranties are typically offered when purchasing big-ticket appliances and home electronics. "Hey, wouldn't it suck if your television stopped working?" the sales pitch generally goes. "Give us a bunch of money and we'll make sure it sucks less."

There are a whole bunch of reasons why extended warranties are a rip-off. Briefly:
- Because many issues will be covered by the manufacturer's warranty.
- Because many repairs may cost less than the warranty itself.
- Because the extended warranty generally won't cover accidents, or abuse, or fudge damage.

How to Avoid Being Ripped Off:
Don't buy them. Even aside from the above reasons, there's a general rule about insurance -- which extended warranties are a form of -- that you should know. On the other side of every insurance deal is an insurance company with nerds and spreadsheets who know exactly how much that insurance should be worth and will sell it to you for a markup way higher than that.
For example, let's say you're insuring against an Uh-Oh.

The insurance company figures this Uh-Oh has a 1 in 10 chance of happening each year, and if it does, it will cost $1,000 dollars. The insurance company will conclude that this insurance should cost them about $100 a year, and will then offer it to you for $150 a year with an enormous smile.

That's not completely unreasonable, incidentally. They obviously have to cover their overhead, the costs of maintaining all those nerds and spreadsheets, and they certainly have a right to make a profit. But you also have the right to not overpay for shit.

Now, in some cases, you should really still buy insurance. For things like home insurance, or life insurance, or car insurance, where you couldn't afford the costs of an Uh-Oh, then insurance is usually a prudent idea. It spreads out the costs of the Uh-Oh into small, bite-sized chunks. But if the Uh-Oh is less big -- more of a Meh-Oh, I guess -- where you can afford the costs, there's a concept called "self-insurance" you should know. This basically says, "Don't buy the damned insurance, Chester." The money you save by not buying it will more than offset the costs you'll incur. Losing a television would suck ... but it's something most of us can probably recover from.

#2. Movie Snacks
According to a panel of angry fathers, a thing of popcorn costs 10 goddamned cents to make, and charging $5.50 for it is highway goddamned robbery. It turns out that a staggering amount of box office revenue goes directly to the studios, which leaves theater owners few options to actually make money with their business other than setting massive, father-enraging margins on their popcorn, and candy, and nacho cheese -- which is particularly insulting, as many organizations actually pay movie theaters to dispose of excess "nacho cheese" generated by various industrial processes.

How to Avoid Being Ripped Off:
Sneak your own candy into the movies. This is a time-honored pastime that everyone's probably done at one point or another. I think this is why those huge puffy vests got so popular for awhile.
"Please don't hug me. This thing is filled with cheese."

#1. University Textbooks
Compared to the big costs like tuition, textbooks are kind of a footnote, but a frustrating one. They're rarely usable for more than one course, get regularly updated and "refreshed" to make them harder to resell to next year's suckers and in many cases are barely even referred to by the professor. What are we buying 800-page books for if we only need 70 pages? Have you heard of the Internet, you colossal dinks? Little demons packing up electric O's and I's, and giving them to tiny robots to carry long tubes? (I think that's how it goes; I refused to buy the TCP/IP text during my undergrad.)

How to Avoid Being Ripped Off:
You could study less. That's always been a popular choice.
More practically, many students are now getting together to share texts with friends, or using reference copies available in the library. Many textbook excerpts can also be found online -- whole textbooks can occasionally even be found on those websites that are not in any way going to be linked here, but we're all cool, so you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Amazon.com obviously.

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